Jadwiga Sawicka (born in 1959 in Przemyśl) is an interdisciplinary artist who creates pictures for everyone, and photographs, installations and objects; she is a curator and lecturer. In 1984, she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, defending her diploma in Prof. Jerzy Nowosielski’s studio. Her works from the 1980s do not exist; the artist repainted them or destroyed the paint layer, not being satisfied with the results of her actions. From the mid-1990s, the artist began to create works, the idea of which became her trademark and which she developed over the following years. She became interested in imaging text, painting fragments of sentences or single words taken from the media or advertisements, in large, black letters, most often on a uniform pink background, although she began to change the colours with time. This method of depiction, and in particular the contrast between the inscription and the background, became the hallmark of her work. As she said: "I am interested in various degrees of distance from an intense, pure colour; also the contradiction existing in this whitening": pastel "colours are intended to be subtle, in practice they are often bland; but this nausea, in contrast to the resoluteness of the letters, creates a tension that interests me"("The Noble Language of Painting" – a conversation between Małgorzata Jurkiewicz and Michał Jachuła with Jadwiga Sawicka, in: "What after Cybis?", Ed. M. Jachuła, M. Jurkiewicz, catalogue of the exhibition at Zachęta - National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 2018, p. 302). She initially paints her "written" works on canvas, then she also places them in print on various types of media, such as tapes, billboards, boxes, posters, pencils, and leaflets.
The second group of works, very characteristic of Jadwiga Sawicka, are those depicting clothes, which she creates in various techniques. The artist has created a series of plasticine sculptures, and paintings and photographs, both large-format and smaller, the theme of which is the owners' garments deprived of their owners. For the author, they are signs of the history and the presence of their owners: "They [...] remain a shell, a packaging that was animated by the fact that someone wore them" (from the quoted interview).
In recent years, the artist has been creating painting covers mainly of books about art, and volumes on other topics, giving them original titles. In 2013, Jadwig Sawicka received the Jan Cybis Award, and in 2016 – the Katarzyna Kobro Award. Her works are in the collections of many Polish institutions.
Małgorzata Bogdańska-Krzyżanek
