Faculty Of Painting The Academy Of Fine Arts In Gdansk

Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk

History of Faculty of Painting goes back to the very beginning of the Academy, legendary "Sopot School", which founders were mostly painters. Krystyna Łada-Studnicka, Józefa Wnukowa, Hanna Å»uÅ‚awska, Janusz StrzaÅ‚ecki, Juliusz Studnicki, Jacek Å»uÅ‚awski and a sculptor Marian Wnuk. It is worth to mention them here, because they were great artists and personalities, and our professors had pleasant and grateful memory of them.
During sixty years of history of the faculty, among many famous and distinguished artists, connected with the Academy, we can find Aleksander Kobzdej (1947-1951), Stanisław Teisseyre, who worked from 1950 to 1965, Stanisław Michałowski (1950-1953), Stanisław Borysowski, who ran the Painting Studio from 1953. Jan Cybis worked from 1955 to 1957. Piotr Potworowski ran the Studio of Painting after his return from England that is from 1958 to 1962. Teresa Pągowska started her artistic career here. Among many outstanding artists and teachers, whose lives were permanently connected with the history of the Faculty and Academy, Zygmunt Karola, Rajmund Pietkiewicy, Maksymiliam Kasprowicz, Władysław Jackiewicz, Kazimierz Śramkiewicz, Kazimier...

The current exhibition in Istanbul, organized at the kind invitation of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Marmara University, is a great opportunity to present works of the artists connected with the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk and the Department of Visual Arts of the Faculty of Architecture of the Gdansk University of Technology. All the artists have something in common: they graduated from Gdansk Academy. We hope that the exchange initiative between the Gdansk and Istanbul academic circles will let us to get acquainted with each others' works and share experiences. Our exhibition at the end of 2010 in Istanbul, the current European Capital of Culture, is both significant and symbolic. The city of Gdansk, famous for its quest for freedom and for making Poland a European country again, is also a candidate for this honorable title. Our country has since become a member of the European Union, a fact that allows us to draw a symbolic parabola as at a certain point in the past the fate of Europe was decided in Istanbul. While looking for our own European identity, it is important to remember the history because without it the European identity seems to be incomplete. Gdansk is a well-known place in Europe, f...