Ryszard Winiarski, Action Workshop, inaugurated February 7, 1976
Ryszard Winiarski, Game 10 x 10 – Logical Course, Painting 12, acrylic on canvas, 1977
In 2021, Olga Stanisławska, writer and reporter, donated a painting by Ryszard Winiarski titled Game 10 x 10 – Logical Course, Painting 12 from 1977 to the Galeria Studio collection. Executed in acrylic paint on canvas, the one-meter square is typical of Ryszard Winiarski’s work of the period. Winiarski (1936–2008) was a painter and engineer by training and constructed paintings using a concept of system, model and function.
Winiarski probably donated this work to Ryszard Stanisławski and Urszula Czartoryska in the late 1970s. Stanisławski was director of Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz from 1966 to 1990, and Czartoryska was curator of the museum’s modern art department, specializing in 20th century photography. In 2023, their daughter Olga Stanisławska, while organizing her parents’ estate, found three more objects that she deduced formed a coherent whole with the composition on the canvas. One was a small panel inscribed on the back “Game 10 x 10 – logical course (part II)” and containing a description of a board game with one hundred sections: “The black elements appear on the plate consecutively, using the rule of the check [sic. chess] horse moves, beginning from the upper left field of the plate.”
As Olga Stanisławska has noted, “the board represents an instruction/description of the work, as created by the swerving movements of the knight, and this is how the painting is structured.” It follows that the acrylic on canvas composition given to us for deposit in the collection, is a “picture” in a double sense. First, as a painting, but secondly, as a representation—an image that reflects a specific story—it is a record of a game that the artist had previously played using the chess horse.
However, this was not the end of the discoveries. The artist also donated other intriguing objects to Mr. and Mrs. Stanisławski: a wooden box with blocks in black and red, and a square game board painted on a board and divided into one hundred fields.
A label on the back informs that the work is part of a broader series described as “Attempts to create games of chance and strategy resulting in art objects.” A second inscription, also affixed to the back of the painting, reads, “Take turns with your opponent to set up your stones so that the sides are not in contact with your opponent’s stones. The player for whom there is no longer a free field loses. The game builds a picture with the laws of strategy.” The signature under this text—”Winiarscy 1972” [Winiarskis plural]—raises curiosity.
“Winiarscy” suggests that the idea for this work, and perhaps the whole series, came about in collaboration. Winiarskis plural means that Ryszard worked on it with his wife Emilia Bohdziewicz, an artist who created conceptual paintings and installations. She presented one of these at Galeria Studio in 1990 under the title Drawing with Thread (pictured). This would also mean that the game—a leitmotif of Winiarski’s work since the 1960s—implied interaction and was conditioned by interaction. The Winiarskis’ game, intended for two people, could also be a kind of meta-commentary. Not only art, but also marriage can be imagined as a game. It is also worth considering this work as an important contribution to Winiarski’s mythology as an artist. He did not act alone, he benefited from the contributions of others, he formed collectives. These are the rules of games, unless one is playing solitaire.
Winiarski worked in the spirit of institutional criticism: he undermined the roles of modern art institutions: museum, gallery, market. He portrayed art as a space of interaction and collectivity. One example is his Action Workshop, inaugurated at Galeria Studio on a “Free Saturday” on February 7, 1976 and running for three weeks.
Action Workshop was part of a series of meetings with the public started in 1975 under the direction of Andrzej Ekwinski, the program manager of the Galeria Teatru Studio. The events were held on Saturday afternoons and were open to all, not ticketed. Winiarski proposed the motto—posted with stenciled letters on the wall—“Think, propose, name, sign, join the exhibition.” The emphasis on thinking and language is interesting: think, propose, name, sign. We are moving into a space of discourse in which categories associated with fine arts like talent or personality are dismissed as unnecessary. We all have an equal opportunity and we can all start an intellectual game. The Workshop space is divided into four sections: Point, Line, Square and Sign. Participants could take up the game, using paper, scissors, crayons or other utensils, interpreting the initial concepts in any way they wanted. Photographs preserved in the documentation of Galeria Studio exhibitions testify to the success of the game Winiarski proposed.
Participation and active blurring of class distinctions was an important thread in Galeria Studio’s early exhibitions and projects, and Ryszard Winiarski’s work belongs as much to the history of post-avant-garde art as it does to the history of art education in Poland.
Dorota Jarecka
