The collection is the photographic documentation of the Fifth Biennial of Spatial Forms Cinema Laboratory (Kino Laboratorium) that took place in Elbląg, 1973. Photographs were made by Tomasz Sikorski, in those days a young neo-avantgarde artist, asked for documenting the event by Gerard Blum-Kwiatkowski, the main organizer of the Biennial, founder and director of the EL Gallery in Elbląg.
From the very beginning in 1965, the Biennial of Spatial Forms was one of the crucial manifestations of conceptual art in Poland, besides the art symposias in Puławy, 1966, and in Wrocław, 1970. For the EL Gallery which was found a few years earlier by Gerard Blum-Kwiatkowski, the Biennial was the essential undertaking of the entity. The initatior of the Biennial worked as a decorator in the Mechanical Work Zamech factory in Elbląg. He was a self-educated artist of German background who decided to stay in Poland after the war, adopted Polish surname and took a job in Elbląg. In 1961, the Elbląg city council accepted his request for adjusting the ruins of the Protestant church for an art workshop. One year later, after necessary renovation works, in the church building, there has been opened the exhibition of art pieces by Blum-Kwiatkowski and Janusz Hankowski. That event is considered as the inauguration of the EL Gallery.
In 1965, Blum-Kwiatkowski opened the First Biennial of Spatial Forms. The basis of the undertaking was the close cooperation between invited artists and workers and engineers from the Zamech. The artists were to reuse the scrap metals from the factory and discussing their projects with the plant crew. Due to these assumptions, the workers should become virtual coauthors of the arworks. Such a vision met the ideological demands of getting closer the working class and intelligentsia, proletarization of the artistic culture and involving working masses into the cultural production. In fact, thanks to ritualization of the ideological discourse and the Zamech’s patronage the artistic freedom and possibility of realization of giant compositions were given to the artists while the participation of the workers was technical and material consultation and production of the objects rather than creative input.
The cooperation with Zamech provided the artists with the possibility of making large scale objects and presenting them outside the gallery, in a public space. Participants and organizers of the Biennial were inspired by the Soviet constructivism. They sought to move from the traditional view on sculpture as a close body detached from the surrounding area toward the creation of works dedicated to one real space and adequate for the landscape. That is why in the name of the event are „spatial forms”. The nonfigurative spatial forms proposed by the artists had to help with the „organization of the space” of the city and they actually did – the objects still nowadays create specificity of Elbląg’s landscape. They are from the beginning popular among and admired by citizens. And from the state authorities’ point of view, the Biennial was one of many events which by a means of modern art and with the participation of reputable artists served to nationalize the so-called Recovered Territories.
The Biennial became the event of the national scale as the first ever case of so broad cooperation between the industry and artistic milieus. In the event in 1965, 50 artists took part, mostly from Poland but also from Italy, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. During the event, from July, 23, to August, 22, less than a half of the objects were finished – the rest was realized afterwards in August and September. Finally, 40 spatial forms were set and placed in different parts of Elbląg. During the Biennal, the exhibition called the Second Parade of Modern Art Confrontations ‘65 (II Parada Sztuki Nowoczesnej Konfrontacje ‘65) was organized with participation of more than 50 Polish artists, among them Jan Berdyszak, Marian Bogusz, Jan Chwałczyk, Zbigniew Gostomski, Edward Krasiński, Alfred Lenica, Ewa Łunkiewicz, Jadwiga Maziarska, Jerzy Rosołowicz, Henryk Stażewski, and Kajetan Sosnowski. There was also the exhibition of paintings by Lajos Kassak, clandestinely transported from Hungary by Marian Bogusz, co-organizer of the show. In November, in the National Museum in Warsaw, the exhibition of dummies and models of Elbląg’s spatial forms was openend. Director of the Museum Stanisław Lorentz initiated the entity’s patronage over the EL Gallery and events in Elbląg.
The Second Biennial of Spatial Forms was not so conspicuous – only 17 persons were invited to participate and finally, only 9 ( Oskar Hansen, Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, Grzegorz Kowalski, Henryk Morel, Julian Pałka, Maciej Szańkowski, Lech Tomaszewski, Magdalena Więcek, and Stanisław Zamecznik) came to Elbląg. This time the Biennial was accompanied by the exhibition of modern art too. The Third Biennial, in 1969, shifted from giant spatial forms to studio work and free choice of the medium. Thanks to that change, new, syncretic works linking together color, sound, motion, and light were created. Only 5 artists participated in the event that year: Kazimiera Szymańska, Włodzimierz Borowski, Piotr Perepłyś, Paweł Freisler i Zbigniew Książkiewicz.
The Fourth Biennial was called the Dreamers’ Congress (Zjazd Marzycieli) what was a signal of the preference for a concept or vision over an actual realization. In result of such a conceptual attitude, readings, lectures, programme texts, descriptions, film and photo shows, performances and presentations of models occurred instead of the large spatial forms known from previous years. The event was proceeding without an audience, except for the critics and reviewers. Among participating artists, there were Włodzimierz Borowski, Andrzej Partum, Ewa Partum, Przemysław Kwiek, Zofia Kulik, Stanisław Dróżdż, Jerzy Ludwiński, Zbigniew Makarewicz, Barbara Kozłowska, Jan Chwałczyk, Wanda Gołkowska, Krystyna Sokołowska, Antoni Dzieduszycki, Zbigniew Warpechowski, Andrzej Matuszewski, Jarosław Kozłowski, Anastazy Wiśniewski, and Leonard Przyjemski.
The experimental and interdisciplinary approach was maintained by the Fifth Biennial known as Cinema Laboratory (Kino Laboratorium) and taking place from June 15 to 20, 1973. This time, the main subject was film and the Workshop of Film Form (Warsztat Formy Filmowej) from Łódź became the co-organizer of the event. However, artists working in media of word, music, theater, and visual arts presented their pieces as well. The central question was the language of a film while the most important aim of the undertaking was to exchange different experiences and to research on the possibilities of the medium of a film. The organizers opened the whole Biennial for the audience as well as resigned from any awards and classifications. The atmosphere of artistic freedom and democratization enhanced experiments and discussions. Besides WFF, several groups participated in the event: Studio Eksperymentalne Polskiego Radia i Telewizji, Studio Kompozycji Emocjonalnej, Grupa w Składzie, Galeria Adres, ART Laboratorium, Grupa Remont, Gdańska Scena Eksperymentalna, Wielobranżowa Spółdzielnia Poetycka, Studio Béla Balázs, as well as 30 individual artists from Poland and a dozen or so from abroad.
In 1974, during his visit to the family in Germany Kwiatkowski got injured in a car accident and had to stay abroad for the rehabilitation for a few next months. Eventually, he chose to remain in Germany – he returned to the German name Jurgen Blüm, settled in Cronberg, then in Hünfeld, and there continued his activities as an artist and a curator. His unpresence in Elbląg meant the end of the Biennial of Spatial Forms, the exceptional event which marked out a number of shifts in the art in Poland, firstly toward neo-constructivism and nonfigurative art, then to conceptualism, and ultimately to neo-avantagarde film and new media art. The Biennial was extraordinary also because of the broad collaboration betwen artists and workers in the first editions of the event, the popularity that constructed then spatial forms gained among the citizens, and last but not least, the Polish-German identity of Blum-Kwiatkowski, the creator of the show, who looked after the German material heritage in Poland in times of strong anti-German propaganda under the rule of Władysław Gomułka.
Tomasz Sikorski visited Elbląg for the first time in 1972 and a part of his photos was made during that visit. Asked by Blum-Kwiatkowski for making a photo documentation of the Fifth Biennial of Spatial Forms Sikorski came back to Elbląg in 1973. The collection that was the effect of these visits, containing about 250 photographs, is still in possession of the artist. It is a remarkable evidence of on of the crucial events in the history of the neo-avantgarde in Poland.
Sources:
Karolina Breguła, Spatial Forms as the Centre of Everything, Warszawa 2013.
Galeria EL, V Biennale Form Przestrzennych Elbląg 73 – Kino Laboratorium. Informator, Elbląg 1973 (https://artmuseum.pl/en/archiwum/druki-artystyczne-galerii-wymiany/2932/130148).
Dorota Michalska, Gerard Kwiatkowski: Embodying Historical Complexities in Postwar Polish “Recovered Territories”, „ARTMargins”, 02.12.2017, http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/exhibitions-sp-132736512/featured-artist/807-gerard-kwiatkowski.
Piotr Piotrowski, Znaczenia modernizmu. W stronę historii sztuki polskiej po 1945 roku, Poznań 2011.
