en-62 | QUART

Faculty of Historical and Pedagocial Science

Journal financed by the
Faculty of Historical and Pedagocial Science
at the University of Wroclaw

Issue 4(62)/2021

Editorial

The last issue of our quarterly this year, is a special one, as it is entirely dedicated to the artists and art of Wrocław, present in this city since 1945 until nowadays. Wishing to achieve the highest possible quality of texts, we invited leading experts on this subject which was divided into various artistic disciplines and methodological approaches. Our authors have, indeed, succeeded in fulfilling this difficult task to write about Wrocław’s art in a competent yet relaxed manner.

I therefore recommend reading the following articles, all the more so because the title art appears in them as an answer to a number of concerns of a theoretical nature – the classic question “Can a line be drawn?” (Jerzy Olek); and more historically grounded ones – as what the specificity of Wrocław experiments in art looked like in the years 1945–2021 (Zbigniew Makarewicz). The diversity of research attitudes is matched by different spheres of contemporary art, such as street art or, more broadly, urban art (Manfred Bator) and Structuralism, which was rightly regarded as a hallmark of Wrocław’s art as early as the 1970s (Andrzej Kostołowski). In an attempt to cover a fairly broad spectrum of Wrocław’s artistic output in recent years, we have included texts on fine-art photography (Andrzej Saj), sculpture (Cezary Wąs) and printmaking (Dorota Miłkowska). We could not, of course, lack articles on architecture (Michał Duda) and on the art of design present in the projects and creations of the employees of the Faculty of Interior Architecture of the State Higher School of Fine Arts (Tomasz Mikołajczak). We started with a conceptual description of a line, and the last essay is dedicated to painting inquiries into space, which for Urszula Wilk, a Wrocław-based artist, is, as Marek Śnieciński puts it, both a painting issue and one of the basic existential questions.

I hereby encourage You to read this special issue, published in its entirety in the Polish-English version, which has been made possible owing to the financial support we have received from the Department of Culture of the Wrocław City Office. I would like to thank also Dr. Sylwia Świsłocka-Karwot, our thematic editor, for her substantive comments and “work from the foundations”, full of hope that through our joint efforts Wrocław will be more widely associated not only with the Dwarfs’ statues, but also with high art, which can never be enough in this not very elevated and, unfortunately, recently lowering its level, world around us

On behalf of the Editorial Board
Prof. Dr. habil. Waldemar Okoń

Od redakcji / Editorial