The gallery KOHANA made its debut with the show Critics, Artists, Koszalin, presenting work by Ignacy Bogdanowicz. The artist, who died in 1989, worked on the Baltic Sea coast and helped organise almost all of the plein air festivals in Osieki. These events took place in 1963-1981, and as the avant-garde painter Henryk Stażewski said, they were a sort of “congress dedicated to art.” The most important Polish artists of the day took part, including Tadeusz Kantor, Natalia LL, Andrzej Dłużniewski, Józef Robakowski and Marian Bogusz, alongside critics such as Wiesław Borowski, Urszula Czartoryska, Ryszard Stanisławski and Hanna Ptaszkowska.
The title of the exhibition refers to a moment in one of the Osieki festivals when the participants were divided into “critics”, “artists” and “Koszalin” (referring to a city on the Baltic coast). Bogdanowicz, for whom participation in the plein airs was one of the most important experiences shaping his artistic path, represents this last category.
The exhibition was be dedicated to recollecting the work of Bogdanowicz and calling up the artistic atmosphere of that time. The mysterious term “Koszalin” will also be clarified and the appropriateness of this term will be questioned; the lens of history affords some distance. Bogdanowicz’s most representative works will be presented: works that were exceptional against the background of the avant-garde of the day. The artist modernised the concept of relief and it is precisely his two-sided works from the beginning of the 1970s that will be shown at the opening of Kohana Gallery. Bogdanowicz worked with various materials, including waste from the furniture factory in Słupsk.
Ignacy Bogdanowicz (1920-1989) worked in painting, drawing, relief, spatial form, graphics, set design and posters. He was active in organising artistic circles in Słupsk, Koszalin and the central Pomerania region. In 1938 Bogdanowicz studied painting at Stefan Batory University in Vilnius; during the Second World War he was subjected to persecution in the Soviet Union. In 1945 he began to study painting at the Vilnius State Art Institute. He arrived in Poland in 1946, settling in Słupsk. Bogdanowicz helped organize the House of Artistic Work in Ustka and the plein air festivals in Osieki. He was a co-founder of the Polish visual Artists’ Association’s Koszalin branch. In 1974 Bogdanowicz helped create the Nowa Brama Gallery, which operated in Słupsk. His works have been presented in more than 75 shows in Poland and abroad.