Jerzy Bereś
Sculptures of Wood
10.06-30.07.2022

Opening
10.06.2022 (Friday)
18.00 – 21.00

Most of Jerzy Bereś’s works have two layers to them—one which deals with universal issues that touch every person, and another which cannot be understood without some knowledge of recent Polish history. Although the two layers are interwoven, Bereś’s work can be interpreted through only one of them (though this would seem to be a mistake).

To fully understand, we must look closely, for there is a paradox here. The subject of his work was the political artist, embroiled in his historical, political, and social context. This is what he lived and breathed, it was all that was vital to him. He was conscious of this entanglement, he examined it; he symbolically signaled this by appearing in many demonstrations with a noose around his neck.

At the same time, he believed that the context in which he was fated to live had a universal dimension. The experience of people living in a country assailed by two dreadful totalitarian states, and then a life up to the late 1980s in a society under the pressures of the communist system, should be of interest to everyone. After all, it could happen to anybody, perhaps not in such a dramatic form, although who can say.

Bereś believed that his work and performances anticipated many important events, including the fall of communism in Poland. Is there something in our future that Bereś still has to tell us? There is doubtless a great deal in our present.

This exhibition of Jerzy Bereś’s work is divided into two parts. We are showing the first in our Warsaw gallery, and the second at the Art Basel, where the artist will have a solo presentation.

Jerzy Bereś was born in 1930, died in 2012. Studied at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts (1950-1955). He lived and worked in Krakow.

Jerzy Bereś
Cepiarnia
1970
wood, plate, leather, fabric, rope, acrylic
279 × 283 × 281 cm

Jerzy Bereś
Ymbol
1987
wood, hemp rope, acrylic
270 × 240 × 180 cm

This is a tall creature made of a log and bars, recalling a standing eagle with a crown. Instead of wings, it has an S-shaped bent branch, out of which stick wooden feathers. “S” is the missing letter in the title of this work, which seems to say that Solidarity had become an essential component (or wing) of the eagle that is the crest of Poland.

Jerzy Bereś
Normalizator
1969
wood, metal lids, rope, acrylic
127 × 71 × 53 cm

Jerzy Bereś
Ethical Sokha
1991-1992
wood, rope, fabric, acrylic
300 × 190 × 390 cm

Ethical issues are crucial to Bereś’s work. We might say that he swapped aesthetics for ethics in his philosophy of art. Conscious of the fact that art cannot be subject to outside norms, he formulated a concept of supranormative ethics, the ethics of transgressing the norms.
“Ethical Sokha” alludes, in a sense, to “Visions” of the early 1960s, in which Bereś gestured toward primitive tools. A Sokha is a tool for ploughing, which means we might assume that an “Ethical Sokha” should serve to plough the conscience. There are two elements to the decision: the wing and the lash, with a red ribbon. The work might be interpreted in terms of the dilemmas involved in Poland exiting the communist system.

Jerzy Bereś
Poklepywacz
1970
wood, leather, acrylic
173 × 105 × 39 cm