About me
The spontaneity of gesture, the need to introduce deliberate order in arranging spatial plans, uniting the form, contrasting small delicate shapes with massive smooth spaces, rhythm, dynamics and monumentality of composition – this is a definition of contemporary medal – and since I am a sculptor, those are my tools to build a private platform of contact with other people. … I love sharing myself with others, I feel that when I do not do it, I only exist, not live. As eyes mirror the soul so my medals mirror my emotions. In all my artworks I deal with intimate themes that I experienced and ruminated during my life till now. I am closely related to them – personally and emotionally. I try to depict and enhance it through adequate and conscious sculptural form. Each theme I work upon brings to my mind a specific, individual interpretation of its essence by an adequate relief. I also seek new forms of plastic message which emphasize the individual character of each new medal. This continuous search prevents fossilization within one plastic convention, trains the mind and makes man learn, discover new things all the time and feel young and curious about the world.
~ Anna Wątróbska-Wdowiarska
About my art
The medal art by Anna Beata Wątróbska-Wdowiarska is a fascinating and reflection- inducing phenomenon. There is no doubt that studying under the supervision of professor Zofia Demkowska, a precursor of contemporary Polish medal art and an outstanding pedagogue, advanced the birth of Beata Wątróbska’s talent and artistic personality. Upon graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1987 she was a fully developed and mature artist. She owes the excellent command of medal making techniques to her mother (already deceased) Stanisława Wątróbska-Frindt who worked for the Warsaw Mint. The expert knowledge she acquired and her own extraordinary manual powers allowed her to reach the unique mastery especially in the technique of plaster casting. Her rich imagination opens for her every now and again new areas in which – basing on her already acquired skills – she is able to find out her identity. Sometimes while experimenting she almost reaches the limits of the absurd, where what is impossible becomes possible and all this thanks to her own discoveries which enable her juggling with the medal form. She uses this form to express equally absurd, enigmatic and puzzling contents which she finds in the world of literature, art and music. She is inspired by the lives and works of famous controversial and eccentric personalities such as Edgar Allen Poe, Salvador Dali, Klaus Kinski or Eugene Ionesco. Being bewitched by them, intermingling surrealistic metaphor with the grotesque or lyricism, Beata Wątróbska builds the world of her medals full of guess-work and hidden meanings, the world of extremely rich and manifold form bearing the distinct imprint of the artist’s personality.
~ Ewa Olszewska-Borys
Vice-president of FIDEM Warsaw 1998
The record of Anna Wątróbska’s artistic activities can be summed up in two words: concentration and precision. Her talent and exceptional competence allow her to deal with various themes flowing from her rich imagination as well as to realize public orders sometimes quite often difficult and elaborate. She can not only express the essence of nature and events but also the acquirements of an individual (the medal dedicated to Krzysztof Penderecki) She treats the portraits so excellently caught with unusual subtlety and completes the image with the filling up elements thus crystallizing the artistic whole. In Anna Wątróbska’s huge artistic output there are artworks which show the richness of formal solutions, perfection of a small relief language, an original and still fresh way to highlight the spatiality of forms and the artist’s characteristic, perfectly mastered style. Her creativity and still unsatisfied willingness to be artistically active lead her towards spatial sculpture. Anna Wątróbska’s vast artistic output, realizations and exhibitions place her among the best representatives of Polish art.
~ Magdalena Dobrucka