Kordegarda Project

curator: Paweł Giergoń
cooperation: Adam Repucha
Kordegarda Project curator: Magda Kardasz

The exhibition presents the fruits of several decades of work by the Warsaw artists Hanna and Gabriela Rechowicz in the field of the decoration of buildings of public use and exhibition pavilions in Poland and abroad. From the 1950s onward, Hanna and Gabriel Rechowicz worked with many outstanding architects: such as Bohdan Pniewski, Jerzy Hryniewiecki, Mieczysław Gliszczyński, Jerzy Baumiller and Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka. They gained recognition at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s for their painted wall decorations in the cocktail bar of Bristol Hotel in Warsaw, their murals and mosaics at Dom Chłopa, and monumental decorations of the interior of the Supersam supermarket. In the artists’ portfolio are to be found nigh on forty projects realised in the period1957–92 in many Polish towns and cities.

In their architectural paintings, the Rechowicz duo employed various mosaic and painting techniques, often combining them within a single work. The compositions received a unique quality through the choice of material used: for example, carefully selected river pebbles, tiles or ceramic waste, which, bonded together with mortar, created an abstract relief – as well as through the motifs borrowed from the canvas painting and commercial graphic design of Gabriel Rechowicz.

The exhibition presents a selection of nearly fifty works by the two artists. Their never before shown original cardboards, boards and painting sketches are strikingly fresh in their colour solutions and diversity of artistic vision. Particularly noteworthy are the unique designs of visual decorations for People’s Republic of Poland propaganda industrial exhibitions in Moscow (1959), Beijing (1960) and Madrid (1970), today the only preserved material trace of those impermanent artistic projects. The exhibition in the Project Kordegarda Gallery is also a tribute to the work of Gabriel Rechowicz who died in late 2010.

Gabriel „Gaber” Rechowicz (1920–2010) – studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the State Graduate School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, and architecture at the Gdańsk University of Technology. Winner of the 1st prize in a nationwide competition for illustrations for the works of Adam Mickiewicz (1954), and Gold Medal for illustrations at the XII Triennale di Milano. His works were shown in solo exhibitions in Budapest, Sofia, East Berlin, Prague and Bratislava (1959), London (1964, 1985), Lausanne (1965, 1977), Paris (1966–67), Caen (1968), Tokyo (1972–74), Brussels (1975), Cologne and Düsseldorf (1976), Auvers-sur-Oise (1989) and Brunoy (1990).

Hanna Rechowicz – studied painting and interior design at the State Graduate School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. Painter, sculptor, interior decorator, theatre scenographer and artistic textile designer. With husband Gabriel Rechowicz, co-author of numerous visual decorations in architecture.