Maria Michalowska (1925), ONE MONTH, 1974.

machine print/paper, 70 x 50 cm
signed in marker l.d.: Michalowska 1974

Studied 1951-1957 at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, graduating with honors in the studio of Prof. Eugeniusz Geppert and Prof. Stanisław Pękalski. Her work includes painting, drawing, photography, spatial objects and conceptual events. During the 7th International Meetings of Artists, Scientists and Theorists of Art in Osieki in 1970, she presented the event "One Week", about which Jerzy Ludwiński wrote that "it consisted of a photographic documentation of certain facts, simultaneously controlled and accidental, as if the artist daily rendered one multiply of a known and unknown situation" (Jerzy Ludwiński, Convention Free Zone (1972), [in:] Tenże, Epoka błitu, Cracow 2009, p. 216). In turn, the artist herself explained: "My events are rather anti-events, I'm interested here in tracing traces of presence in time rather than traces of events. I am fascinated by the calendar. I find something magical in the calendar-symbol and calendar-object. I enlarge the calendar page to the size of a poster that accompanies events, photograph single days, produce calendar collages - in various ways I try to stop time" (text from 1973 in typescript, [in:] E. Koscielak, Maria Michalowska, Koscielak Gallery, Wroclaw 2014, p. 74). The featured collage from 1974, although a two-dimensional composition, focuses Michalowska's concept regarding the temporal and spatial aspects as if through a lens. In the "One Month" calendar, the temporal succession of days has been disrupted - digits and numbers are repeated, some have been rescaled. This depiction corresponds to the individual perception of time and reveals the mechanisms of memory.

As the artist emphasized, "The past is used to know the present. The experiences of the past persist in the mind as traces of memory. In this storehouse there are neither sequences of time nor spatial relationships - there are only connections and associations based on similarity or contrast. By blurring the differences between what is "perceived" and what is "remembered" we create a new unity and a new harmony of all sensations - a new succession of time and a new spatial-temporal continuum" (M. Michalowska, Playing with Time, text from circa 1971 in typescript, [in:] E. Kosciellak, op. cit. p. 78).