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On 11th April, the City Gallery will fill up with the works of Barbara Zworska-Raziuk, an artist whose dual use of glass and ceramics serves as a starting point for reflecting on the fundamental dualities that shape our reality.
Barbara Zworska-Raziuk (1959–2019) graduated from the Faculty of Ceramics and Glass at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław in 1984. She began working there in 1985, first as an assistant to Wojciech Wilkowski in the Glass Design Studio, later becoming an associate professor. From 2009, she led the Second Studio of Artistic Glass, and in 2015, she was awarded the title of Professor of Fine Arts.
Zworska-Raziuk’s work consistently explored two central themes. The first, rooted in the tradition of sculptural portraiture, focused on the human experience – its emotions, longings, and joys. Her glass busts, placed on ceramic pedestals, are often enveloped in a symbolic, almost sacred aura of reflective silence and contemplation. The second theme drew inspiration from mineralogical forms such as geodes, druses, and secretions. Here, the dynamic, pulsating structures of glass are balanced by the raw solidity of ceramic blocks.
Although her art references tangible forms drawn from the material world, these serve as a gateway to reflection on abstract and elusive concepts. One of them is time. Through the themes undertaken in her work, Zworska-Raziuk contrasts human, anthropological time with the vast, cosmic timescales beyond human perception. Her work is deeply rooted in duality: lightness balanced by weight, movement by stillness, luminosity by shadow, and fragility by resilience.
Reflecting on the duality in Zworska-Raziuk’s work – extending far beyond form or creative material, exhibition curator Mirosław Jasiński writes: From the beginning, Barbara Zworska-Raziuk’s glass art has sought to combine what is concrete (like clay) and spiritual, like light penetrating through a pane of glass. It is an interplay of matter and spirit, of the earthly and the unearthly, concrete and illusory – related to what is readable and unreadable in humans. Just as secretions crystallise within rock crevices, so too does creativity, and even life itself – it seek its own space. To be complete, to resonate, to have depth and have another side, it requires an opposite – the raw structure of earthly matter, clay. It is a formula found in nature: stone and ice, water and sand, brightness and darkness.
The opening of the exhibition, accompanied by a concert from Lidia Grzanka-Urbaniak, will take place on Thursday, 10th April, at 6:00 pm.
The exhibition is open to the public until 8th May 2025.
Curator: Mirosław Jasiński
