Maria Magdalena Kwiatkiewicz, co-founder of the company YES, has been building her collection of contemporary Polish goldwork for over 25 years. As she admits, initially her main motives were fascination with beautiful objects and the desire to possess them; then the need arose to prove that jewelry is a beautiful art form. The collection, collected methodically and with a deep understanding of the subject, currently numbers several thousand exhibits.
The Collection of Contemporary Polish Art of Maria Magdalena Kwiatkiewicz holds a special place among private and public collections of Polish jewelry and accessories. Constantly enriched, the collection constitutes perhaps the only collection that allows us to know and present the history of Polish jewelry and accessories design – from the immediate post-war years to the most recent ones. The selection of about 200 works presented at the exhibition, chronologically arranged between 1945-89, is of course a part of the collection, but it is representative of Polish achievements in the field of jewelry art – says Dr. Michał Myśliński from the Institute of Polish Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, curator of the exhibition.
The exhibition presents the achievements of artisans from the past era in the context of the techniques used, the aesthetic developed often linked to the availability of materials, and even the trends and tendencies imported from abroad. The collection of works presented as part of the exhibition is representative of Polish jewelry design of this half-century, showcasing works created both in cooperatives for the production of folk and artistic crafts such as the Poznań „RYTOSZTUKA” and the Krakow „Imago Artis”, but also in Warsaw’s ORNO and Warmet, as well as the artistic work of individual creators who formed the design core of state-run factories.
When after the Second World War the entire country was struggling to recover from the ruins, art was also experiencing a difficult moment. Everything that represented solely aesthetic qualities gave way to utilitarian objects. This was also the case with goldwork art, which had to be reborn, creating the foundations of the Polish silver school. Its representatives, first individually, then together with goldsmith cooperatives such as, among others, the Poznań Cooperative of Artistic Industrial Work „RYTOSZTUKA”, designed and created jewelry, satisfying the needs of an increasingly wide range of recipients – recalls Ilona Rosiak-Łukaszewwicz, director of the YES Gallery.
What projects were being implemented at that time? What determined the design of the time? What can we be proud of today, and what is better to keep quiet about? – these questions will be answered by the exhibition „From Idea to Industry. PRL Jewelry from the Collection of Maria Magdalena Kwiatkiewicz”.
„From idea to industry. PRL jewelry from the collection of Maria Magdalena Kwiatkiewicz”
YES Gallery, Paderewski Street 7 in Poznań
17.04 – 9.06.2023.
Opening: April 14, 2023 at 19:00
www.galeriayes.pl
