Jadwiga Maziarska: Assembly

Polish avant-garde artist

This monograph is a comprehensive tribute to the Polish artist Jadwiga Maziarska (1913-2003), featuring essays by renowned art historians and curators, and a selection of archival materials from 1940s-1990s. Maziarska was one of the most important voices of the avant-garde in Poland, alongside recently recognized Erna Rosenstein, her closest friend and interlocutor. The title "assembly" speaks to Maziarska as engineer and bricoleur of source materials and methods, producing an abstraction which is uncategorizable within the postwar Krakow Group (Grupa Krakowska II) and beyond. Her artistic processes were rooted in the physicality of assembling as a response to concepts of reproduction and modernity. Active from the 1940s through to the 1990s, Maziarska was informed by science, phenomenology, mass photography, printed reproductions and newspapers clippings, out of which she developed autonomous structures.