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On 28 November, Elżbieta Terlikowska will take visitors to the City Gallery in Wrocław on a journey back to childhood through her solo exhibition, “Tricycle” – a journey that is certainly sentimental, though not necessarily filled with carefree joy.
Elżbieta Terlikowska is a set and costume designer who also works in graphic design and small-scale printmaking. In 1974, she completed her diploma under Professor Krzysztof Meissner at the Faculty of Industrial Form Design at the Wrocław Academy of Fine Arts, and went on to obtain a painting diploma in Professor Józef Hałas’s studio. She made her debut as a set and costume designer in 1986 with New Liberation, based on Witkacy and directed by Jerzy Bielunas, at the Wrocław Opera House. She is the author of numerous solo exhibitions and stage and television designs, and has received many prestigious awards in the fields of visual art and set design, both in Poland and abroad.
The titular little bicycle forms the associative foundation on which Terlikowska builds the exhibition’s entire narrative layer. It is a direct reference to the artist’s childhood memory of her father, who at the time was an avid cyclist. It also symbolises the nomadic character of her early years, spent between the courtyards of Wrocław and her grandparents’ home in Podlasie. In the exhibition, however, the artist brings out the mystery, mysticism and melancholy of that time. As Aleksander Jasiński, author of the catalogue text, observes, Terlikowska presents childhood with all its sadness, in the transience inherent to it, and with the childlike symbolism that is incomprehensible to adults. The collage dolls featured in the presentation carry an element of the unexpected and the unpredictable. As the critic writes: Their patchwork nature is a bit like childhood memories – they are pieced together from crumbled fragments torn from time. The theatrical, metaphysical atmosphere enveloping the exhibition is also noted by curator Mirosław Jasiński, who remarks that it evokes, with impressive force and suggestiveness, the emotions and experiences of Tadeusz Kantor’s “The Dead Class.”
What Terlikowska’s “Tricycle” particularly reveals, however, is how deep and inseparable the relationship between childhood and art remains.
The exhibition is open until 30 December 2025.
Curator: Mirosław Jasiński.
The opening reception, accompanied by a musical event, will take place on Thursday 27 November at 6:00 PM.
The exhibition is held under the Honorary Patronage of the President of Wrocław.
