TIME STANDS STILL     Elzbieta Sikorska

Nothing has changed. Except for the course of boundaries, the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.

– Wisława Szymborska, Tortures1

Nestled under a rich arboreal canopy, the home of Elzbieta Sikorska feels as if it were a world apart from the suburban sprawl that surrounds her immediate neighborhood. That home, which she shares with her husband, is also her studio. As she works away in this secluded forest-within- a-city, she creates close-up views of sylvan scenes that seem both commonplace and utterly Romantic. Some of them may focus on an aged trunk, or the dry, lifeless limbs of a felled tree. Others may highlight the vital energy of branches reaching with finger-like extensions towards an imaginary source of light, or those entangled in the muddy soil at the edge of a brook.

To contemplate these forest scenes is to become a traveler of sorts, if only to return to half-forgotten places of one’s past, or imagine other sites, known only through distant historical accounts.

This tension between the mundane and the larger-than- life, if not almost mythical dimension of Sikorska’s forest imagery is complemented by her approach to her medium. All of her drawings foreground the process through which they are composed, through dense webs of lines laid over one another. While some of these lines are fine to the point of disappearance, others burst with energy – creating a feeling that this process is both highly deliberate and full of spontaneous gestures.

And then there is her palette, a somber yet richly nuanced play of browns, ochers, and grays, shot through with streaks of crimson, various shades of blue, or burning yellow. On the one hand, the rather subdued color range evokes a particular time within the annual cycle, the end of winter, when nature bares its bones to the world. The intense chromatic accents remind us, in turn, of the care- fully crafted artifice of these compositions, prompting us to consider their deeper symbolism.

Many of Sikorska’s forests appear to carry traces of past events, whether those caused by nature’s grand indifference to itself, or by human actions. She repeatedly invites us to speculate what may have happened at those sites, or what may have motivated her to choose them. Yet she consistently refuses to give us anything more than a bare hint: a broken branch, a sheaf of dry stalks of grass bent to the ground, or a nearly-invisible human outline super- imposed over a turf.

The recognition that what one beholds is merely a fraction, a remnant, or a layer of something much more encompassing, cannot be separated from the artist’s identity as an immigrant from the “Old World.” Moreover, even if the heightened sense of history may be a defining quality of the very idea of Europe, it seems to carry particular weight in Poland, Sikorska’s country of origin. Poland has a tremendously complicated history, shaped and re-shaped for centuries in terms of its geographical boundaries, ethnicities, cultures, and ideologies. No narrative in this country exists without another, counter-narrative. The result is a historic memory full of contrary perspectives.

In much the same way, Sikorska’s studies of the forest are also replete with hints of different possible narratives, even if the events she alludes to may remain stubbornly hidden within their facture.

The idea that any landscape is a description of a site, but that any such description (topography) is always shaped by time, is just as important for another ambitious cycle of works in this exhibition. These are the frieze-like images of confrontations, some of them focusing on battles of animals against their kin, others on men fighting other men. Thinking of the visual lineage of these compositions takes one all the way back to the temple reliefs of ancient Greece. At the same time, their colors and handling constantly remind us of other sources of inspiration, much closer to our time, from the “Blaue Reiter” aesthetic of artists like Franz Marc, to the foreboding gestures of Neo- Expressionists like Anselm Kiefer.

This layered nature of her structures is also expressed through her choice of isolated figural motifs – a draped torso, a wing, a head – which underscore the archaeological quality of her visual language.

While this blending of diverse styles and references may feel like an anachronism, it is essential to understanding the larger idea of the works in this exhibition: that all of our being is a being in time. Yet as this artist also suggests by this fusing together of different layers of the past into a single image – time itself is infinitely malleable. Hence it may be more appropriate to see her works not so much as representations of things that “are,” but as studies of different stages of being and becoming.

In this sense, Sikorska’s drawings also call to mind the persistent non-finito in the works of Alberto Giacometti, who once said that his goal was not to depict a phenomenon, but his perception of that phenomenon – or to render vision itself (rendre ma vision). In saying so, he was alluding to the very process whereby external stimuli are received by the eye, and translated into visible marks on paper.

Sikorska’s webs of lines convey a similar intent: to create images that function as repositories of moments that, in turn, comprise the act of seeing. Present yet stubbornly immaterial, these images consistently remind us that nothing ever is fully describable, or place-able, and that no landscape, however familiar, can ever be fully known, or become a home of the traveler. As the great poetess of her country of origin, Wisława Szymborska, observes in the closing lines of one of her poems inspired by Polish history:

Amid these landscapes traipses the soul, disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away,

alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence,

while the body is and is and is and has no place of its own.2

Aneta Georgievska-Shine   Curator

1  Wisława Szymborska, “Tortures,” in Poems, New and Collected, 1957-1997 (Orlando-Austin-New York-San Diego-Toronto-London: Harcourt, Inc. 1998): 202. 


2  Szymborska, op.cit. 203.