Halina Jaworski’s paintings are always thoroughly individual and invariably full of meanings. They are created with thought, intuition and emotion, and separating the three factors to measure the participation of each one in the process not only would not make sense, but also seems impossible. All of them are equal and indispensable. Together they result in the art that almost always contains an element of anxiety and sometimes the one of inner contradictions or oppositions; the art which simultaneously unifies its complementary values. There are a few different periods Halina Jaworski’s art could be divided in, all of them expressing the artist’s personality with the same intensity. And her personality is by no means ordinary – it is strong and fascinating, bearing indelible marks of her fate. She had to leave her first homeland, Poland, in 1968. As a fifteen-year-old girl she went to Israel where she lived for a few years. She graduated from high school and started studying fine arts. Then she moved to Düsseldorf to continue her education at the Academy of Fine Arts under Günther Uecker. She kept changing the countries she lived in together with their cultural background and traditions, making new acquaintances and friends, she kept learning new languages and creating anew her own independent world that existed more or less concealed, or revealed, in her unshakeably authentic painting. She did not let her professors influence her and resisted the temptation of adapting her art to new and fashionable artistic trends. She only painted what and the way her inner conviction and needs told her. “My artistic work is expressed in my poetry. Dreams, moments, signs, the state when the borderline between things you have experienced and the ones you have not identified yet, or things you have realized, which are open and clear to you and those that are dark, that you are not aware of, is blurred,” she confessed. Halina has been fascinated with books since her childhood. She liked looking at them, leafing through or removing them before she learned how to read. Already at that time an attentive observer could notice the predilection for art the child was beginning to reveal. She enjoyed not only illustrations, but also printing. Years later those tastes resulted in her linguistic experiments, i.e. the records of words viewed as artistic structures. They were mostly comparisons based on declention or conjugation in different languages. Those activities also revealed the adversities the young artist was facing when switching from her mother tongue first to Hebrew and then to German. One of the most talented Professor Uecker’s students expressed herself with different forms of activity already while attending the Academy of Fine Arts. She created collages, reliefs and assemblages, and organized artistic actions in the open air. Most of all, however, she “constructed” books – the large-format ones made of tracing-paper sheets, hinged or in a kakemono form, to be hung on the wall. They included The Book of Love and the one devoted to Strzemiński. Halina Jaworski has always, since that time until now, concentrated on the message conveyed by her works – on thoughts, comments or reflection. The way it is conveyed is also important, but that method always subordinates to the message itself, since the latter is considered superior. Until 1977 the artist kept using solely whites, softened with the most delicate shades of ochre. In 1977 she started painting geometrically inspired works which, however, remained far from the rigorous use of a ruler and compasses. It was still the time when the artist was looking for her own idea of art. Besides, she was still a student (she received her degree in 1979 under Professor Uecker), although she had a few breaks in her course, e.g. in 1977 when she got a scholarship and went to Japan or in 1979 when she was working on a time- consuming commission, namely the installation on a grand scale visible from a distance of many kilometers created to celebrate the anniversary of the formation of Wuppertal through the amalgamation of Barmen and other towns. She placed a number of ten-meter-high flagpoles with banners on the Wupper River bank. The flags were white and silver, four meters wide and had circular openings of a one-meter diameter. They were attached to the flagpoles at the height of six meters. The Ecksen (Mehreckige Leinwandbilder) cycle of polygonal paintings created since 1979 revealed Halina Jaworski’s first radically unique way of expression that was infallibly typical of her artistic work. Since then the artist has been continuously developing this kind of innovatively shaped canvases, parallel to creating mostly large-format, traditionally rectangular paintings. The Ecksen series includes reliefs of untypical, asymmetric and irregular, although geometric or geometricized shapes. They consist of several parts put together or put onto one another, each of which constitutes a separately-stretched canvas often entirely covered with acrylic paint, but sometimes with some raw, unpainted sections. The color combinations of the Ecksen components are sometimes contrastive – red is juxtaposed with green, or orange with blue – but from time to time they are limited to one range of subtle shades. Everything depends on the hidden content of a painting. The Mezuzah of 1981, for instance, is very colorful, with one part cheerfully green and the other covered with red and canvas-shade stripes. Not everyone knows what the word “mezuzah” means. It is a small wooden, metal or glass case with a rolled parchment inscribed with two excerpts from the Torah. It is fixed by religious Jews to the main doorposts of their homes. Some of them treat their mezuzahs as protective talismans. Another Ecks of 2001 entitled Rachel and Jacob consists of two reliefs in the form of elongated rectangles rendered in subdued ochre colors. The title figures are the Old- Testament symbols of great, long-unfulfilled love. Among the polygonal reliefs there are also works related to the tragedy of WWII, e.g. the beautiful and complex Shot in the Head painting of 1982 composed of several parts – a black one, two red ones, and a red and green one – separated by a zigzagging arrow, narrow like a ribbon, with green and raw- canvass-shade stripes. The Eagle of 1982 probably represents the artist’s sentimental memories of Poland. It is painted green, referring to the color of the Polish-army uniform. These unconventional works, although they may often seem abstract, always have their encoded content that is sometimes based on associations, sometimes proves symbolic, and sometimes easy to realize, but most often the paintings are impossible to be read without a comment or at least without knowing their title. Almost twenty five years ago when I was analyzing that stage of Halina Jaworski’s artistic work I wrote the following: “Estheticism has no access to this art. It is significant and it sneers at tradition. It opposes the latter and offers a new vision of art. It can be a tragic and witty comment. The Ecksen perfectly  organize the surrounding space. They mock a painting as such, but offer a new proposal for it. “The Ecksen ... fly about the walls totally disinterestedly. Their flying quality and sharpness, as well as their shapeless solids attract with their dissimilarity or otherness from everything we have seen so far and they make us consider them not only worth noting, but also as representing peculiar beauty that is hard to repeat.” In 1984 Halina Jaworski began painting a new series of large-format, two or more part works entitled Ancestors (Ahnen), which usually resembled altars and constituted a compositional whole. Numerous canvases of the cycle in different ways refer to Jewish tradition and culture. Again, similarly to the case of the Ecksen, these references are hidden and most frequently become clear only when accompanied with a comment. From a formal point of view the paintings are abstract and geometric, although they simultaneously represent architectural images and seem to solve spatial problems, sometimes complicating and sometimes simplifying them. Such simplicity, for instance, can be noticed in the two- part, symmetrical painting entitled Menorah. In its lower part there is a clearly-outlined three-dimensional hexagonal red structure, whereas the upper part is covered with seven narrow light-color stripes alternating with wider ones rendered in subdued green, orange, carmine and blue. Only the title suggests the viewer the proper sense of the painting. A menorah is a seven-branched candelabra and a symbol of Judaism, one of the oldest symbols of the Jewish people. Traditionally, it has also represented the Burning Bush that Moses saw on Mount Horeb. Halina Jaworski was also inspired with history, in particular with the relief from the Arch of Titus (81) commemorating the triumphal march of the Romans with the trophies from conquered Jerusalem (70). The trophies include a menorah from the demolished Solomon’s Temple. The ascetically pared-down painterly composition repeats the shape of the menorah from the Arch of Titus. To realize the sense of the painting, apart from seeing the intriguing and eye-gladdening perfectly symmetrical arrangement of lines and colorful surfaces, one needs to fathom its legend, find the source of its origin. Similarly, the Hommage à Maurycy Gottlieb diptych of 1989 must be looked at analytically, with regard for symbolism and the original object of inspiration. The painting is a peculiar reference to the one by Gottlieb (1856-1879), the latter representing a prayer scene in a synagogue on the Judgment Day, with the congregation including the artist himself. In the left, light part of her diptych Halina Jaworski reproduced the talith thrown over the painter’s shoulders – the white shawl with traditional one-colored stripes. The right, dark part of the diptych, brown and black with sparks of blue at the bottom, and carmine at the top, shows the synagogue interior with a separated light place called bimah – the central area elevated by a few steps, with a balustrade and a table for placing the Torah and reading aloud from it. Nonetheless, not only the content of Halina Jaworski’s painting is encoded and difficult to fathom without explanation. Its geometric and spatial arrangement is also disturbed, unreal and incomprehensible. It is hard to figure out what is close and what is distant, what was rendered considerably veristically and why, and what was limited to brief indications. The complex, surprising and unconventional way of space arrangement in the Ancestors series paintings is a consistent continuation of the artistic concept for the Ecksen cycle. It is,  however, carried out only inside the paintings, whereas in the earlier series it shaped both the inside and the outside of the reliefs. The interpretation of the motif of a geometric space structure seems easier in the case of such works by the painter as The Orient in which the lacy, decorative outline of Arabic architecture is accompanied with a grey, as if metallic ribbon with a triple hexagram. Or as the Shophars diptych. It is enough to know that a shophar is a liturgical wind instrument most frequently made of a ram’s horn, blown by Jews to signal certain festivals. The horn is also supposed to remind of the biblical story according to which Abraham was commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac and when he was about to do it he was given a ram with its horns entangled in bushes to replace his child. Some of Halina Jaworski’s paintings of the Ancestors cycle are easier to interpret since they refer directly to the commonly known motifs from the Old Testament, like The Burning Bush or Jacob’s Ladder. It does not mean, however, that without knowing the title one would be able to recognize the subject with ease. Most of these multi-part canvases do not require the knowledge of Jewish or Christian cultures and traditions together with their customs and symbols. The painter allows the viewer a complete freedom of interpretation. A beautiful diptych entitled Great Gate with a bright space on the viewer’s side and a black abyss on the other can be read as showing opening the door to the sphere of non-existence or entering earthly life at birth – appearing in the world which to a newly born seems a black tabula rasa. Looking for symbolic or metaphorical content in the multi-part paintings by Halina Jaworski constitutes only one method for their reception. Another one, by no means less important, is reading them through contemplating their forms. In the process the lines and colors, structures and implied spaces, quasi-interiors and quasi-objects make the viewer’s mind fall into a trap. What seemed simple and obvious at first glance, and resembles entering an unknown tidy room, from close up turns out to be a labyrinth of walls, screens and boards blocking all the ways in, through or out. The geometric structure of these strangely disturbing paintings refers to the tradition of the first avant-garde, perversely, in their deceptive objectivity. Their complexity and the secret of the paradoxical structures hide the metaphor for wandering around, uncertainty and confusion as regards the spiritual sphere, and the one for human fate – a difficult and a little ironic paraphrase of human existence. The author herself put it fairly adequately when she wrote: “One could say that I am looking for communication, harmony and the unity of two worlds – the inner one and the outside one. This artistic work has led me to my own metaphysics.” The artist gave a mysterious title to her exhibition in the Poznań-based Arsenał City Gallery, i.e. On the Way Home, allowing the viewers to understand it and comment on it their own way. Thus, one can only ask oneself the question if the way home leads to the painter’s old homeland, Poland. Or does it lead humans from their birth to death? Besides, the exhibition includes a beautiful blue painting of the Ecksen series entitled Doll’s House. Perhaps this is the destination – the doll’s house that in our conflict-ridden, chaotic, dangerous and noisy civilization remains the only childhood-time safe haven, a quiet place of undisturbed belief in good. Bożena Kowalska H. Jaworski (the statement of July 28th 1975, the exhibition catalogue), Klasse Uecker 1, The Academy of Fine Arts, Düsseldorf, November 1974 – February 1975, Essen 1975, p. 5. B. Kowalska, Halina Jaworski, Project No. 5, 1985, pp. 50–53. The Judgment Day (the Yom Kippur) is an annual Jewish festival. It is the tenth day starting from the Jewish New Year and is devoted to prayer and atonement. A talith – a rectangular prayer shawl worn by Jews over the head or round the shoulders, usually white, horizontally striped and fringed. H. Jaworski (the statement from the exhibition catalogue), op. cit.
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