Welcome to the exhibition “The Painting Speaks” created with children and young people in mind. Its topic is painting, or more precisely, the way a painting is created, its elements, that is, means of artistic expression used by artists. The exhibition consists of paintings from the museum’s collections not shown to visitors on a daily basis and special artistic and sensory installations. If you want to learn more about the museum paintings presented here and those that have become an inspiration to installations, I invite you for a short walk. Let’s start with the Line zone.

Right at the entrance to the Line zone, on the left side behind the glass, there is a painting sketch on paper. Its author is the late Lublin artist Zenon Kononowicz. In the 1960s, he created a series of drawings depicting various birds and animals. These were illustrations for an album called Animals Are Talking, containing drawings of zoo inhabitants. Kononowicz did not copy reality, but created new content by emphasizing and exaggerating the characteristic features of the animal, while omitting others. Look closely at his work. A few efficient brush strokes allowed the artist to create a free-form sketch of a camel.

Go to the Composition zone. Next to the large frame, on your right, there is a portrait of a young woman.

It was painted by Bolesław Barbacki from Nowy Sącz – an artist, teacher, social activist, actor, director and patriot. The painter was the creator of many portraits, a chronicler of nature, faithful to the principles of classical painting. As a realist, he recreated the psychological images of models, giving the pictures an intimate and decorative character.

In front of you, there is the figure of a young smiling woman in a ¾ shot, looking straight at us. This is an example of a static, balanced composition. The artist creates a mood of peace and balance with warm light falling softly on the face of the figure on the right.

Hendrik van Heemskerck created his paintings in the 17th century, called the golden age of Dutch painting, in which still lifes were particularly popular. These are painting compositions painted in a realistic way, with precision showing objects from the environment: luxurious and everyday use objects, which often concealed many meanings. Look at the overturned jug, the white clay pipes, the crumpled sheet of paper, the glass of water, the brass candlestick with the still smouldering candle. The objects testify to the recent presence of human. A limited range of colours and a spare composition consisting of a small number of props give the impression of peace and duration. The juxtaposed objects were intended to express the truth about the passing of life.

Efraim Mandelbaum was a Polish painter born in Lublin. He undertook numerous artistic journeys, which influenced the shape of his work. In time of World War I, during an open-air painting session, he was arrested on charges of espionage. Strong stress caused him to suffer from mental illness and, despite treatment, he had relapses. He created landscapes, still lifes and portraits. In 1943, he and his wife were killed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

Look at the still life with a basket, a clay jug and fruit. The painting, kept in warm colour tones, is an example of a closed composition. Clear and strong light falling on objects and fruit emphasizes their form.

Right next to it, there is a still life of Janina Miłosiowa. The artist was born in Łęczna and graduated from art schools in Lublin. She was the director of the still existing Fine Arts Secondary School in Lublin. Miłosiowa’s work is primarily oil painting: realistic landscapes of Lublin and the Lublin region, but also paintings inspired by the tradition of Polish colorism, an example of which is the work presented here. Colorism is a trend in Polish painting of the interwar period emphasizing the role of colour as an element building the visual space of the image. In front of you, there is a still life painted in cool colour tones. In the centre  of the composition, there is a vase with several brushes, next to a few sundries and fruits. The artist emphasized the simplicity of ordinary objects in the painting.

Among the still lifes collected here, find a work by Stefan Dylewski titled Still Life with Candies. The painting is an example of an open composition, so its end cannot be seen because it goes beyond the frame of the painting. The artist painted a fragment of a table covered with a tablecloth. The folds of the freshly ironed cloth create oblique, rhythmically repeating elements. This arrangement of slants breaks the static composition, creating an impression of dynamism. You can see the sweet treats on the table: candies wrapped in colourful, glossy papers, delicious cookies arranged on a glass plate. The composition delights and tempts with its taste.

Go further. On the opposite wall, you will find two installations.

You will see a painting by the 19th-century painter Stanisław Żukowski titled The Flood of the Lake at our exhibition in the Gallery entitled EMOTIONS, created by children. It was commented by one of the young curators – Małgosia. Here we present its printout. The force of nature presented in the painting in the form of turbulent water breaking into the land has become the inspiration to prepare a sensory installation. Foamy, dynamic, rough waves painted in the foreground  in various shades of grey and white can move and wave, sparkle and shine thanks to you.

The original work titled Wind in the Mountains by Rafał Malczewski can be found on the second floor of our museum in the Polish Painting Gallery. We placed its outprint at the exhibition. Rafał Malczewski was the son of the famous Polish painter Jacek Malczewski, who influenced his son’s early work. Rafał was a painter, drawer and writer. He loved the mountains, skiing and mountain climbing. The dominant theme of his works – both oil and watercolour – was the mountain landscape, which the artist painted at any time of the day and year, in various weather conditions.

The harsh winter landscape depicted in the painting The Wind in the Mountains is broken by the figure of a tall highlander hanging out laundry. Colourful fabrics blown by the strong mountain wind contrast strongly with the snow-covered white mountain slope. You can literally bring the dynamic image to life by setting the fabrics placed on the installation in motion thanks to the fans and accessories available here.

Go to the next zone.

Wojciech Fangor was a graduate of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts,  painter, graphic and poster designer. He created his works in Poland and abroad.

Paintings with circles with blurred, foggy edges, evoking strong optical impressions, became characteristic of his work from the 1960s.

One of the works from the series is presented at the exhibition. The abstract image in a square format shows a blue circle placed centrally on a contrasting orange background. The painting is characterized by simplicity, minimalism and lack of texture. The contourless, flickering transition of colours gives the effect of a positive illusory space. Let yourself be invited to play a game with Wojciech Fangor and interact with the image.

Alfred Lenica is an artist who, in search of his own artistic path, constantly conducted painting experiments. He often emphasized that his main goal was to find in art the appropriate expression for experiences and emotions that are most elusive and difficult to name.

“Drawing, line are architecture, and paint and colour are the music of the image,” the artist wrote on the back of one of his works. In his opinion, painting was similar to music, which was also his life’s passion.

The image you see in front of you shows unspecified forms surrounded by lines of varying thickness, a contour enclosing their shapes. Inside the forms, there are transparent colour spots that appear to be spilled, overlapping in places as if they wanted to connect. The artist used pure and expressive colours. Amaranth, green and purple dominate. The background of the image creates a uniform yellow surface. Strong, compact painting forms create a dynamic painting structure.

Jan Szancenbach’s painting was shaped in accordance with the tradition of teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, that means in admiration for colorism. The artist created still lifes, interiors and landscapes. His works are full of light, colours and joy of life.

In front of you, there is a still life with pears and a plum arranged on a plate. Next to it, there is a large, bulging bottle with a high neck in a straw basket, with a small apple next to it. Multicoloured objects were placed on a surface covered with a patterned, striped fabric. In the background, there is a wall covered with geometric, multi-coloured planes.

Have you noticed that the description of this colourful image does not include the names of the colours? Look and determine what colours you can see in the image.

Olga Boznańska is an artist working in Cracow, Munich and Paris. Her mother taught her painting. The artist’s topics include still lifes and interior studies, sometimes landscapes and flowers. She painted with oil paints, usually on cardboard. The most important element in her work was colour, especially cool, silvery colours with subtle varying tones. Her painting palette was limited to dark tones, dominated by browns, greens, greys and black, contrasted with accents of white and pink. The artist specialized in portrait painting. She paid special attention to the model’s face, reflecting the state of their psyche and spirituality. She applied the paint with small touches of the brush. She gave up covering the paintings with varnish, thus achieving a matte appearance in the paintings. Boznańska’s painting was dominated by a quality that gives her works a specific vagueness and mystery. In this vein, the presented portrait of a man wearing glasses, with closely trimmed hair, slim face, high forehead and a prominent nose, sitting in the armchair, was painted. The man is wearing a white shirt, black bow tie and a dark suit. The background of the painting is in shades of whitened greens, light browns, greys and blacks.

The author of the painting Virgin Hill is Julian Bajkiewicz. He was a twentieth-century artist who lived and worked in Chełm. His works represent primitive art, also called naive art. It is an art created by non-professional artists, that is, those who have never attended art schools. Julian Bajkiewicz began painting as an adult, after retiring. Painting was for him a therapy recommended by doctors and was supposed to help him cope with difficult war experiences. The artist often painted landscapes on which he recorded old churches, urban panoramas and corners of his city – Chełm. The titular Virgin Hill is a 229-meter-high hill covered with oaks, located near Chełm. At its foot lies the village of Horodyszcze-Kolonia. Legend has it that the name of the hill is associated with the existence of a monastery of virgins in this place, which during the invasion of the Tatars was to collapse underground. The painting by Julian Bajkiewicz is painted in a warm colour tone. It is dominated by yellows, browns, reds and greens. Above the farms depicted in the foreground, towers in the distance a high hill overgrown with trees – Virgin Hill. The painting beams with peace and harmony. A feature of the artist’s paintings are the simplifications and numerous stylisations visible in his work.

An abstract composition on two separate stretchers was the inspiration for the installation – the infinity room zone – a place that creates the illusion of boundless space. All thanks to the play of light, which influences what and how we see. Infinity room was inspired by a painting by Sławomir Marzec, a contemporary artist from Lublin, a graduate and professor of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. In the years 2007–2009 he created the series “Around the Icon”. Look up and down. What you see is a print of one of his paintings from this series and its reflection. The original painting consists of two stretchers: a rectangle and a square, shifted from each other by a few cemtimetres, so they do not create a uniform surface. According to the artist, “this painting is a landscape”, a philosophical message.

Shall we step inside? I’m warning you. Everything there shimmers and twinkles. If you are sensitive to such effects, you can skip this point and go towards the Technique, Texture or Perspective zones.

Tomasz Zawadzki is an artist associated with Lublin. He is a graduate of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Arts and Design in Wrocław, holds the title of professor and has been associated with the Institute of Fine Arts of the Faculty of Arts of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin for many years, where he is the head of the Department of Painting and Drawing. According to the artist, a painting is primarily an arrangement of colourful spots and the impact of emotions. The multi-coloured, bright canvases he created seem to be painted quickly and sweepingly and show emotions. For Zawadzki, colour and texture are important in painting. Red, as well as other paintings by the artist from the 1990s, are painted heavily, have a thick, heterogeneous, rough and very expressive texture, the edge of the canvas is painted smoothly, the structure of the canvas remains visible.

The artist’s original work became an inspiration for an installation showing the painting divided into elements presenting various techniques and the canvas assigned to them. Try to recognize them.

Krzysztof Kurzątkowski (1925–1989) was a student of the Free School of Painting and Drawing in Lublin, the Painting and Drawing College in Łódź and a student of the Art History Section of the Catholic University of Lublin. In addition to painting, he was also involved in graphics – he created posters, book and newspaper illustrations, and bookplates, among others. Initially, he painted figurative paintings, that is depicting real shapes of people, animals and objects. Later in his career, he created abstractions with rich colours and assemblages, that means three-dimensional artistic compositions made of ready-made objects or their fragments. Kurzątkowski often used everyday objects in his art, such as fragments of old fabrics, plywood, boards, cardboard, straw, pieces of bark or printing fonts embedded in plastic mass, as well as window glass and mirrors.

If you want to see other works by Krzysztof Kurzątkowski, please visit the permanent exhibition “«Zamek» Group and Awangarda” on the second floor.

Jerzy Durakiewicz (1934–2016), nick Jerzy Marek, was one of the artists creating the so-called “Zamek” Group. He graduated in interior design from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, but he came from Lublin and was a graduate of Fine Arts Secondary School in Lublin. He was involved in painting and graphic design. He created mainly abstract compositions on canvas or paper, which he often left without a title. He used his own mixed technique – he combined gouache, tempera and watercolour. You can learn more about the artist at the permanent exhibition “«Zamek» Group and Awangarda”.

The abstraction of the Hills on the Vistula inspired us to create a space at the exhibition dedicated to texture.

The work of Vittorio Maria Bigari, an 18th-century Italian painter, depicts a lavish feast described in one of the books of the Old Testament. During it, the Babylonian king Baltazar and his invited guests ate meals from sacred vessels stolen from the Jerusalem Temple. This angered God, who decided to punish him. Balthazar saw the announcement of the coming punishment while the feast was still going on. Then a hand appeared to him and wrote three words on the wall: “mane, tekel, fares”, translated as: “counted, weighed, divided (or distributed)”, meaning the fall of the kingdom of Babylon and the death of the king. Look carefully – on the right side of the picture, halfway up the wall, you will see these three words and the hand creating them. Vittorio Bari’s painting is filled with feasters gathered around a huge semi-round table. Everyone is in a spacious room. Thanks to the linear perspective used by the artist, also called convergent, we have the impression that we are not looking at a flat surface of the painting canvas, but at a three-dimensional image. According to the principles of this perspective, objects painted in a picture become smaller and smaller as they move away from the viewer, and all lines perpendicular to the plane of the picture converge at one point. Look at the lines that create the interior of the room. Do you see the point where they meet?

Adam Wiktor Malinowski is a 19th-century painter born in Lublin. The painting presented at the exhibition shows the remains of the castle in Ostrog, which was in the past the seat of the powerful Ostrogski family of Russian princes. Can you see the round building on the right side of the image? This is the oldest and most important element of the fortress – a residential tower from the 14th century. The castle in Ostrog was destroyed during the Cossack raids in the 17th century and remained in ruins for a long time. It was immortalized in this state by Adam Malinowski, who was very fond of painting atmospheric, romantic landscapes. He achieved depth in the painting by using an aerial perspective. It consists in painting the distant objects  with blurry, bluish shades, without marking contrasts and contours. Now take a look at what is behind the castle. Can you see the aerial perspective?

Go further.

Stanisław Koguciuk (1933–2021) is one of the last folk painters. He did not graduate from any art schools, he had a natural talent, he painted intuitively, out of the need of his soul and heart. Painting was his passion, it gave him great joy. He created works for exhibitions, competitions, collectors and ordinary customers from whom he accepted orders during fairs. The themes of his paintings are rural landscapes, scenes from everyday village life and rituals, and religious scenes. Characteristic features of this artist’s work include symmetry, the lack of linear and aerial perspective, and the use of a vivid, intense colour range. The presented work contains the above-mentioned painting features. Notice how the artist showed perspective. This is an example of a row perspective. The artist used it to convey the depth of the image. Figures of people and animals are grouped into horizontal rows. The lowest ones are closest to us, while the higher ones represent further plans.

In front of you, there is a forest inspired by the Autumn Landscape by Apoloniusz Kędzierski, a painter and watercolourist from the Young Poland period.

The exhibition of French Impressionists, which he visited in Munich in 1888, made a huge impression and influenced his work. He showed how light affects colours in many of his paintings, which he gave a decorative character thanks to their smooth contours.

An autumn landscape with a meandering, winding stream in the foreground shows a cropped fragment of a forest. On both sides of the water, grey and black tree trunks can be seen in the colourful pink and yellow undergrowth. In the background, trees covered with yellow leaves are illuminated by bright sunlight. Look into the distance and “step” into the painting to fully feel the pictorial space.

Then enter the Gallery of Young Curators.

This is a gallery created by young curators. Here you will see paintings from museum collections that touched their emotions. These are works by different authors and painted at different times, from the 17th to the 21st century.

Here, it is time to end our journey through the world of painting illusion, put down the headphones and listen.

Stop and look. In front of you, there is Teresa Tyszkiewicz’s painting Dead-end roads. The monochromatic work consists of straight lines, intersecting and creating arcs. Did you know that the layout of our exhibition refers to a composition created by the artist?

Teresa Tyszkiewicz was born in 1906 in Cracow, died in 1992 in Łódź, the city with which she became artistically associated. She dealt with painting, drawing, textiles, and illustrated books and magazines for children. In the 1960s, she began working on the “Dead-end roads” series, which she created using only lines drawn on an empty background. Look at the canvas: its white surface is covered with freely drawn black lines. You can discover a record of emotions, thoughts and order in them. Miron Białoszewski, a Polish poet, titled one of the poems dedicated to her painting – The Hardship of Thoughtful Movement.

Thank you.