The Annunciations of Marzanna Wróblewska. From the artist’s visual journal

Abstract

Marzanna Wróblewska is a contemporary Polish artist, a painter of landscapes and sacred works. A cycle of paintings entitled Annunciation, painted in the 1980s, can be viewed as a record of a breakthrough that occurred in the artist’s psyche at that time. Initially, she focused on the human form, frequently a female nude in an interior setting and her paintings would reflect an accumulation of pent-up negative emotions surrounding female physicality. In Apperceptions, a cycle of paintings typical of the early period, Wróblewska introduced elements that further emphasized the closing-in of space around the solitary female nude. It is only with the Annunciations that space finally begins to open up in her works and the artist discovers the language of nature, which gradually leads her to move away from the figurative to the abstract, and from the sensual and existential drama to metaphysical rapture and the experience of the sacred. When juxtaposed, the Annunciations have a special compositional rhythm of their own and form a sequence in whose successive scenes a wandering figure roams through a changing, abstract landscape. The cycle can be viewed as an attempt to recreate the emotions that came over Mary of Nazareth when she first heard the angel’s message. The artist encapsulates them in a visual image, using the metaphor of a road to represent the process that occurs in Mary’s inner world. At the same time, individual paintings also illustrate successive stages of the painter’s own journey into the unknown world of emotion. In a sense, the figure of Mary in Wróblewska’s paintings also stands for the painter herself, her own transformation, her growth, and her changing view of her life and purpose.