In search of the Face. Danuta Waberska’s way to sacred art

Abstract

Graduate of the School of Fine Arts in Poznań, Danuta Waberska has spent the vast majority of her professional life in the service of the Church, specializing in the field of sacred art. This work has taken up thirty years of her life. Today, her paintings can be found in many churches, museums, religious community centres, and private collections throughout Poland and abroad. Before supernatural themes first emerged in her paintings, the newly minted artist (who leaves the School of Fine Arts in Poznań in 1969) worked within the New Figuration movement, expressing typical moods of existential pessimism, the drama of alienation, and spiritual emptiness In subsequent years (at the turn of the 1970s and the 1980s), Waberska shows an increased interest in spiritual matters and the related symbolism of geometry and light. Readings in the mystics, Zen Buddhism, symbolic poetry, and depth psychology provide a mine of inspiration for her figural scenes, still-lifes, landscapes, and semi-abstract paintings. The first biblical paintings in the Jacob Wrestling with the Angel series appear, and Signs inaugurate the motif of Tobias and the Angel, later taken up on several more occasions. A spiritual breakthrough in 1985 pushes the artist to devote herself entirely to the service of the Church and sacred art. Her religious paintings primarily include depictions of the face of Christ, the Divine Mercy, the saints and the blessed of the Western Church, and Marian images. Waberska is remarkable for her artistic skill and innovative iconography, the aura of deep faith which emanates from her canvases, her complete devotion to religious art, and numerous evocative depictions of the metaphysical dimension of human life. All this makes her an important and noteworthy figure in the field of Polish Christian art. Her impressively large (and still growing) oeuvre calls for serious in-depth research, which, it should be hoped, will soon be undertaken