Adela Szwaja, “Lot 808” / “Carousel XXVII”, 1977, oil on canvas, 183 x 183 cm

Adela Szwaja’s painting is listed as Lot 808 in the collection inventory. However, the title written in the artist’s hand on the reverse of the painting is Carousel XXVII. It was created in 1977 but its luminous energy-saturated colors are as intense as if it had just come out of the studio.

Szwaja was born in 1925 and studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdansk. She created textiles and paintings. Carousel XXVII belongs to a group of her compositions with sizable formats and concentric arrangements played out in a New Age color palette. They can be associated with both the Orphic painting of Sonia Delaunay and the theosophical current in art represented by Hilma af Klint. However, Szwaja speaks the language of her own contemporaries’ art. She is not far from the emancipatory feminine subject matter undertaken by Maria Pininska-Bereś and Natalia LL.

In the 1970s, Szwaja painted paintings full of affirmation for the body and feminine pleasure, such as Venus in the Sun (1977) and Beauty (1978). A series of compositions dating from similar years contain motifs of faces, feet and hands (always with red nails), swirling around a mysterious center of gravity, these include God’s Gifts (1977), Shine (1980), and the multi-centered, spiraling Carousel XXVII.

This remarkable painting was presented at the Galeria Studio Collection exhibition “Seeing with the Body,” first in 2023 at OP ENHEIM in Wroclaw, and then in 2024 in Warsaw, arousing amazement at the spectacular return of a forgotten artist.

Dorota Jarecka