Exhibitions

The landscape painting of the Karkonosze Mountains emerged with the development of tourism during the Romantic period. Caspar David Friedrich came to the Giant Mountains from Dresden, whereas Quido Manes from Bohemia. Yet, the number of painters creating images of the Karkonosze did not increase significantly until the second half of the 19th century. Wrocław painters Adolf Dressler and Carl Ernest Morgenstern, who ran a class in landscape painting at the Museum of Fine Arts in Wrocław (established in 1879), greatly contributed to popularity of the mountains.

The enormous panorama of the Karkonosze Mountains (20x7 meters) was the last work of Adolf Dressler (unfortunately lost after the artist's death). He, together with his pupils Gustav Olbricht, Wilhelm Krauss, Georg Müller and the only woman, Gertrude Staats, initiated the period of landscape painting created outdoors. Their base was situated in Przesieka in “The Grand Lime Tree Inn”. The disciples, however, used to paint winter landscapes and broad panoramas situated in the higher parts of the mountains. In the 1920s “The Brotherhood of St. Luke” was established - a society of realistic painters, influenced by Impressionist painting. “The Brotherhood of St. Luke” was established. That was Hans Fechner who initiated it and he was joined by such noted artists as Alfred Nickisch and Georg Wichmann. However, new generation of painters interested in the landscape of the Karkonosze appeared not earlier than in the 1970s. Most of them were graduates of The Wrocław Academy of Fine Arts.

"I'm not a Barbizon painter, I don't paint in nature. Photographs are my initial sketchbook. My landscapes are usually inspired by a particular place, by some atmospheric phenomena. However, they do not exactly reflect them. I do not care about copying nature faithfully. I usually look for a specific atmosphere in the mountains and that is the source of inspiration for me." says the artist, Bogumiła Twardowska-Rogacewicz.

Her mountain landscapes differ from those of the artists creating in the area. They are much more abstract, austere and there is not much vegetation there, they also lack architecture or human figures. The attention is focused on the very space, on the matter and colors of the rocks, on the unique play of light, on the mists floating between the mountains, the clouds, the sunlight reflected on the surface of the Karkonosze ponds.

Some of Twardowska- Rogacewicz's landscapes captivate with perfectly defined colors showing the time of day or year, others enchant with individual interpretation of space and forms shown in synthetic abbreviation.

In compositions dedicated to some characteristic places of the Giant Mountains (old German name of the Karkonosze) such as Śnieżne Kotły (ice cirques), Równia pod Śnieżką or the vicinity of the Small and Large Pond, we can observe highly generalized landscapes, representing a synthesis of many views. I refer here to the monochromatic series of gouaches on paper tinted the shades of sepia and gray-blue, painted in light, airy or even floating patches. The distant plans and multiplied horizon lines in fact make up these landscapes. Or perhaps, their delusions. These are examples of the landscapes which are more imagined, or felt rather than seen from a specific vantage point (there are many viewpoints designed for tourists on the routes of the Karkonosze). The artist seems to focus on a synthesis of space- time she spotted in the mountain landscape rather than referring to some specific places. In these compositions, she puts more emphasis on her emotions which appear while experiencing the solemn, stunning and powerful moments when roaming the mountain trails and she pays less attention to the “superfluous” realistically depicted details. She is interested in emphasizing the moment of noticing the cosmic eternity, which also includes a series of less important events that make our everyday life but these are somewhere outside the pictures, or at least outside the ones I am writing about now. When confronting the power of eternal beauty of Nature, the artist perhaps defines the sources of power and her positive attitude towards the world. By identifying herself with the surrounding landscape, she expresses her subjective internal space.

Art involves the ability to control one's own development, the ability to translate metaphysical and mystical moments into form. Bogumila Twardowska-Rogacewicz feels free to use different languages and different aesthetics. She practices landscape painting, more or less realistic, but she also deals with abstract painting. The saturated with colour, expressive, abstract compositions which she presented at the Jelenia Góra art gallery in the exhibition “Imageless” in 2019, seem to be a bit like a diary recording mental and energetic states which accompany the artist’s days. She also admitted, in an interview given then, that painting abstract lyrical compositions has got a therapeutic function for her.

The picture can then become a kind of electrocardiogram, but also a space of tranquility, a hiding place or some self-reflection.

The both forms of a dialogue - with herself and with the world around her, which intertwine and are practiced in the same breath, add up to a total autobiography. The smoothly interacting images of the external and internal worlds add up to the artist's creative output, testifying to her continuous development, and high skills of artistic depiction

The art of Bogumiła Twardowska–Rogacewicz is characterized by a great potential for creative possibilities. The artist expresses herself not only in painting. She creates stage designs, graphics, and photographs. Genre diversity is also inscribed in her painting, in which one can find almost realistic landscapes reminiscent of old masters, refined in color, full of energy, vibrant abstractions, as well as completely different, humorous depictions of animals. Her interest in landscape emerged after several years of living at the foot of the Karkonosze Mountains. The landscape revealed new spaces to the artist, becoming a path to combine the idea of the modern landscape with abstract painting, which above all defines her work and is in a way her distinctive hallmark.

The exhibition of Bogumiła Twardowska–Rogacewicz presented at the Corridor Gallery of the Jelenia Góra Cultural Center is one of her most surprising recent presentations in Jelenia Góra. “Fotozwidoki” is the result of the artist’s explorations related to the idea of correspondence between visual arts—in this case, painting and photography. The essence of her painting style has always been multidimensionality, which, through the complexity of the painterly texture, allowed for many levels of meaning. In the set of works presented in the Corridor Gallery, the starting point is photography. Most often black-and-white, sometimes in color. On the photographic print, which is already an image of a certain, specific place, the artist paints her imagined landscape. The beginning of the painting is photographic reality, followed by painterly creation. The subject of Bogumiła Twardowska–Rogacewicz’s creative interest becomes the mountain landscapes of the Karkonosze.

The resulting works depict specific places, since their starting point is a photographic document. The realism of photography corresponds with painterly abstraction. The effect of such synesthesia is extraordinary, allowing two realities to coexist within the painting, each being a different way of interpreting the landscape.

One is the reflection of reality in the photographic document, the other is a painterly interpretation. Together they create a new landscape, a kind of collage of meanings, a fusion and dialogue between two kinds of art. What arises from the encounter of these two layers of imagery surprises with its unique composition, new perspective of seeing, and finally the illusion of space, jointly creating a surreal vision of a landscape with an extraordinary structure, colors, and new meanings.

The synesthesia of arts in the interpretation of Bogumiła Twardowska–Rogacewicz consists in the coexistence of two dimensions of reality and several layers of imagery. The form of the composition depends largely on the form of the photographic image. As a result of synesthesia, the artist manages to capture the atmosphere of the landscape and convey the elusive mood of specific places in the Karkonosze, the unique energy each of them possesses.

In such works, the mountains appear in an outline, defined very succinctly, sometimes without color, observed from a distance. When viewed, they transform into symbolic ideas of mountains, imagined through the abstract fabric of painting. The first layer of meaning is photography, an introduction to the represented reality. It serves as a pretext to enter the realm of non-objective painting. The forms within and outside the photograph live their own, independent existence as an abstract image. They draw the viewer deep into the landscape of irregular shapes and colorful spots. Fantastic color combinations animate entire areas of strong impact in the painting, resulting from surprising, extraordinary color contrasts.

The artist boldly combines sharp, saturated, pure colors. In her painting, color becomes energy. In the mountain paintings, she astonishes with the harmony of tonalities and color arrangements, balanced and subtle. The texture of these works is varied, composed of many layers of thickly applied paint, which sometimes reveals the photographic base of the work—the inner reality of the landscape.

Light plays the role of an emotional transmitter related to the aura of a place. In some paintings, it is real light, recorded in the photograph; at other times, the artist creates it from imagination, using brush and paints. It illuminates the mountain spaces, blurs the contours of reality. The concreteness of the photograph fades in favor of the universal message of painting.

The synesthetic photo-painting landscapes of Bogumiła Twardowska–Rogacewicz are among the most interesting contemporary mountain landscapes created at the foot of the Karkonosze. They are the creation of new, multidimensional spaces in painting, which constitute a reality of contemplating nature, define the mood and spirituality of a place, but are shaped by the painterly energy that the artist has inscribed into the space of the painting.

The turn towards mountain motifs through the combination of two completely different art forms produces an extraordinary effect. It is the artist’s opening to an entirely new direction of thinking about painting and photography, previously unknown to her audience. It becomes an attempt to find an interesting form of expressing herself and her relationship with the world. The result of the artist’s explorations is very compelling.