Erna Rosenstein, Coloratura, 1983, ink on paper, 20.5 x 28.5 cm

Erna Rosenstein, Fountain of Silence, 1983, ink on paper, 24 x 32.5 cm

Two drawings by Erna Rosenstein were presented at her solo exhibition “Unexpected. Drawings, Things, Paintings” at Galeria Studio in March 1984. Both are reproduced in the catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition and subsequently entered the collection in 1985, after it had finished. These are the only Rosenstein drawings in the Galeria Studio Collection.

Rosenstein (1913–2004) used drawing frequently, treating it as an autonomous area of her art, a medium equivalent to her painting and three-dimensional assemblage-like objects.

The compositional and linguistic invention in Rosenstein’s drawing works was inexhaustible. The two works in the collection operate by linking image and sound. Both also rely on a certain paradox. They operate on a principle of disappointed expectation. Coloratura is a fantasy of a musical nature where we find a lost violin key and swirling notes. However, contrary to the obvious connotation that appears involuntarily in the field of visual arts, color here is reduced to just black and white. In contrast, there is an oxymoron in Fountain of Silence. A fountain, its water overflowing and rumbling, is a phenomenon rather far from silence. In one of the drawings the image is turned off, in the other the sound.

Behind the artist’s action, which often resulted in the viewer’s surprise and amazement, there was also a desire to convey the contradictions of the creative process. “The line wounds the surface, which begins to glow and have color. Like scratching,” the artist said in an interview conducted by Zbigniew Taranienko and published in the 1984 exhibition catalog.

Dorota Jarecka