Ewa Kuryluk

Pioneer of ephemeral textile installation and air art, painter, photographer, art historian, novelist and poet.

Kuryluk’s work is inspired by autobiography and realism, by shadows, traces and mirrors, by the legends of the Corinthian girl and Veronica’s cloth.

The artist is known worldwide having had 43 solo shows and over 60 group shows, and from catalogues and books. Her work can be found in public & private collections in Europe & the USA, and be seen in the National Museums in Warsaw, Cracow, Poznan, Wroclaw and the Museum of Modern Art in Lodz.

Statement and inspiration

solitary and cautious

at the end

She is no longer afraid

cora

daughter of the potter butades

outlines the shadow of her lover

tracing wind

on water

while war calls him away

Ewa Kuryluk, Miss Anima

Poems: 1975-1979

Maps on walls of interiors in old paintings are mementos from past journeys and signs of secret dreams

– maps within. I have always been a traveler and each journey left traces in my art work. The trip to Corinth, the art center of ancient Greece and the legendary cradle of painting, was of a different dimension. In June 1964 I joined a school trip to Greece because of the Corinthian girl who had invented painting by outlining the shadow of her departing lover. I was first appalled by the city of Corinth, a shabby backwater founded in the mid-nineteenth century when Old Corinth was leveled to the ground by an earthquake. But as we walked across the excavations and I watched my shadow move along the white hot stone, I felt near the Corinthian girl. Admiring the faded colors on the metopes and the brilliant meander pattern of red, blue and yellow in the Museum, I had a revelation. In ancient Greece when temples and statues were covered with bright paint, no division between painting and sculpture existed. They really were twins, like the two dancing maenads on a marble relief fragment, now white but once full of color. Looking up at a colossal stone lady beautifully draped, I imagined her cheeks pink, her lips red, and her tunic in color. In Corinth everything seemed possible and all fitted together. A girl my age with no training invented painting out of an impulse. From the shadow’s outline sculpture was born without much ado, soon to be clothed in paint and come alive, like in the legend of Pygmalion. It was during that trip to Greece that

I discovered freedom, simplicity and the limitless potential of art. Nothing could turn me away. I was and still am on my way to Corinth.

A Greek legend attributes the invention of painting and relief to the daughter of the Corinthian potter Butades. The girl “was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire” (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 35.43.151).

-Early spring 1959 in Vienna, a painting lesson. A girl watches a sparrow on the windowsill. She has a box of watercolors and a glass of water in front of her, but no intention to work. She has always disliked painting, and she doesn’t understand German. She yawns to discourage the teacher, who has approached her with a powder compact. Seeing her own reflection in the small mirror, the girl realizes that she is supposed to paint herself. And 

she does, in a sort of dream. I am the girl.-

-“I write what I cannot draw, I draw what I cannot write.”-

-"My own artistic utopias derive from the irrational conviction that art should be a unique reflection of an individual's fate and experience. It is not so much about creating as it as about using highly sensitive materials [...] to record the grain of the epidermis, the gesture of a hand, a heart rhythm, and our own shadow as thrown by the bright sun." -

Here is her website: www.kuryluk.art.pl/