The Children of Sławoszyno
Jul 5 — Sep 6, 2025
We were thrilled to welcome you to a special evening at the gallery on Saturday, July 5, from 5 – 8 pm, which featured the opening of solo exhibitions by Teresa Gierzyńska and Anna Orłowska, alongside a celebration of the gallery’s fourth anniversary. Thank you for celebrating with us!
The exhibition presents In the Footsteps of Malczewski, a formative photographic series by Teresa Gierzyńska, created during the summer of 1976 in the Kashubian village of Sławoszyno. Composed of vintage prints subtly hand-tinted with aniline pigment, the series offers an early glimpse into the artist’s enduring engagement with the photographic surface as a site for emotional modulation and transformation. Through composition, gesture, and color, Gierzyńska explores mood, memory, and the elusive nature of the image.
The series draws inspiration from the symbolic world of Jacek Malczewski, whose paintings Gierzyńska studied closely during a major retrospective in the late 1960s. She was struck not only by his recurring depictions of children and fauna, but by the emotional undercurrents of his canvases — a blend of unease, reverie, and rural stillness. Years later, in the quiet rhythms of Sławoszyno and the spontaneous presence of its children, she found a living echo of that atmosphere. The resulting photographs conjure a space where observation and dream quietly converge.
A child is a parchment tightly inscribed with tiny hieroglyphs, of which only some you will be able to read
— Janusz Korczak
The children of Sławoszyno, left largely to themselves and deeply at ease in their surroundings, became natural subjects for Gierzyńska’s camera. They visited daily, sometimes offering help, often simply staying close. Gierzyńska captured them in moments of play, mischief, and introspection, allowing their shifting expressions and postures to register a spectrum of moods and states of being. These affective tones were then heightened through aniline dye — used to contour feeling, intensify atmosphere, and draw the image away from the purely documentary.
Gierzyńska’s interest in the interior life of images — their capacity to hold fleeting sensations, layered memory, and embodied emotion — is already visible in these portraits. While most of the works in the exhibition are vintage prints from the 1970s, two new pieces created from original negatives have been produced specially for this presentation. Using contemporary techniques but remaining faithful to the spirit of the series, they extend Gierzyńska’s approach to color and atmosphere while reflecting her openness to new technologies and evolving forms of image-making. In the Footsteps of Malczewski marks an early articulation of a practice in which inner worlds, external landscapes, and the photographic surface coalesce.
