Palimpsest

Hanna Nowicka-Grochal (1961-) was born in Szczecin and graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk in 1987. Her artistic career has been connected with Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot and the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk for over 25 years. Since 2013, when she accepted an invitation to co-found the Chair of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Szczecin, she has been involved in the development of the Szczecin School. Palimpsest, the artist's monumental triptych, was created a year after she completed her painting studies. In an author's commentary, Nowicka emphasises that it is one of the fundamental artistic achievements of her work. The work, the result of self-reflection, a search for her own imagery and personal, mature artistic expression, became a symbolic and real liberation from the inspirational, if not her own, pictorial codes assimilated during her artistic training. The artist trusted her intuition and instinct in the expression of her own self, which she sought in her autobiography and memory. From then on, these themes became the main focus of her dynamically evolving oeuvre, in which she quickly transcended the narrow limits of the medium of painting, creating objects, installations, films and video installations in addition to paintings. In terms of her working method, which involves balancing between artistic media, Palimpsest is of paramount importance to Nowicka's artistic oeuvre. The triptych was created using an unusual material - three worn out blackboards stored in the attic of the artist's primary school, dating back to when she was a pupil there. As both image and object, it synergistically combines the potential of both and represents an important stage in the development of the artist's characteristic inter-media working method. The title of the work refers to its multi-layered structure, of which Nowicka writes "I put my mark - probably once again - on the materiality of these boards, rich in long-term memory, which was very important to me, but with the use of a language that was already new to me, using oil paint and carbon rubbed into it. As in a palimpsest, links were made between the marks, scratches and cracks erased by time and my reuse of the panels and their new reading". Magdalena Lewoc