When showing me a drawing, he would force me to look: ‘here-look-this is the beginning-now follow the line. Yes, don’t stop’ – and when, confused and tired with all the reversals, unexpected twists and thickenings, I found the outlet, he would triumph: ‘See how simple it is? And you need 935 movements to find meaning1’.
Wacław Szpakowski: 935 Movements in an Infinite Line beckons you to enter the world of Wacław Szpakowski’s rhythmical lines. The artist’s oeuvre blends the boundaries between visual arts, science and music. The primary aim of the exhibition is to explore the artist’s ideas. The title was inspired by the recollection of Wacław Szpakowski’s daughter, which the curators interpreted as an invitation to follow the lines, an invitation for each visitor to the exhibition to make a certain number of eye movements. Their exact number and the possibilities of going beyond the area of the drawing depend on each and every one of us – as there is no limit.
Watching the artist’s drawings, one ought to remember that they are not finished works, but merely a fragment of an idea, a process of creating the rhythms of an infinite line. In Wacław Szpakowski’s oeuvre, the line could take on various static or dynamic forms – its nature depended on the rhythms found in the world surrounding the artist and multiplied in his analytical mind.
The reception of Szpakowski’s works is intimate, taking place in the time and rhythm defined by the viewer’s eyes and mind. The artist left behind over 120 ‘musical scores’, which he catalogued in pencil on graph paper and collected in an album of Line Ideas. The key element of his artistic explorations was the joy of finding a single, fractally repetitive idea for a module built with a solid line. Wacław Szpakowski gave us the possibility to follow his 120 ideas, all of which are based on the potentially endless multiplication of lines forming an INFINITE composition. In fact, the word ‘infinite’ has no counterpart in reality, as it is not something we experience on a daily basis. The perpetuum mobile is still but a dream – and Szpakowski’s Rhythmical Lines give us a glimpse of infinity here and now!
An important element of the exhibition is a showcase of contemporary artists who – by way of an experiment – were invited to reinterpret Wacław Szpakowski’s ideas and enter in a creative dialogue with one of the lines.
The exhibition was created in collaboration with the Centre for Culture and Art in Wrocław – A Cultural Institution of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship Local Government as a follow-up to activities carried out in recent years by this institution, aimed to strengthen the importance of Waclaw Szpakowski’s work in the history of contemporary art and broaden the perception of his oeuvre.
1 A. Szpakowska-Kujawska, ‘Jaki był’, as cited in: Wacław Szpakowski 1883–1973. Linie rytmiczne (Wrocław, 2015).