Marta Zboralska (UCL) - 2015-16 Students
marta.zboralska.09@alumni.ucl.ac.uk

The Art of Being Together: Inside the Studio of Henryk Stazewski and Edward Krasinski

This PhD project focuses on the studio of Henryk Stażewski and Edward Krasiński in order to pursue key problems in Polish abstraction and the conceptualist responses to it. In 1970, 45-year-old Krasiński moved into the Warsaw atelier of his friend Henryk Stażewski, a renowned figure of the previous generation of the Polish Avant-Garde – born in 1894, Stażewski knew Kazimir Malevich personally.

Stażewski passed away in 1988; Krasiński continued living in and curating the space until his death in 2004. The interior has been left unchanged since. Despite the studio now being open to the public through the Foksal Gallery Foundation, the complex connection between both artists and the exchange between their practices are still under-researched topics. The flat provides a particularly noteworthy example of a direct conversation between representatives of two Avant-Gardes – Stażewski and Krasiński’s intergenerational dialogue, based equally upon continuation and modification, is a potential source of numerous research questions having wider implications for abstraction per se.