The Legend of Mountain Art

The heredity of talent is an issue that has certainly troubled many generations of researchers.

There is such place in Poland that has long been associated as the cradle of art. There, 900 meters above sea level, at the foot of the most beautiful mountains in Poland, lies the town of Zakopane, where the Rz?sa family has been working and creating for over three generations.

It all started in 1919 in a small town in the Rzeszow region - Futoma. This is where in a peasant family Anthony Rz?sa was born .

He was an outstanding Polish sculptor, he studied, worked and created in Zakopane, where he was lured in 1938 by the Zakopane School of Wood Industry. There he studied in Antoni Kenar's class, which he completed in 1952 at the age of 33 due to the outbreak of World war II. At Kenar's decision, he immediately became a teacher in it. It was he who directed Rz?sa towards folk art, but the breakthrough impulse responsible for the birth of Antoni Rz?sa's autonomous creative identity was suffering, illness and ultimately the death of his mentor. 

"The first crosses, in which I am completely different from this Catholic canon - I made them when the professor was ill and when I saw him getting tired and somehow I couldn't accept it (. . . ) Using Christ, I created man and life and suffering"

Perhaps it is the sensitivity of raw forms extracted from "living" wood material that makes them so close to the recipient. 

Thus, Antoni Rz?sa found many treasures in Zakopane: the right educator, his vocation, himself as a mature creator, and the source of warmth and support that his extraordinary wife, Halina Rz?sa, undoubtedly was. 

Her story began in Krakow - where she was born, grew up and finished school. Because of her health problems she had to go to Zakopane. There, together with her first husband, photographer Janusz Vogel, she was involved in documenting Tatra shelters - together they took pictures which were later published in magazines, among others " Tatternik”. Her photographs were characterized not only by a perfect mastery of the workshop but also an extraordinary knowledge of the mountains. After parting with Janusz she married Antoni Rz?sa. She took up a job as a tutor in the dormitory of Anthony Kenar's school.

She continued her interest in art and culture, documenting her husband's work in her characteristic poetic way, which we can also admire in her landscapes from the Tatra Mountains or the nearby area of Duchnów and Futoma, where she often photographed crosses, invariably inscribed in the rural landscape, strongly associated with folk religiousness. 

The grain of talent growing in both of them was passed on to the next generation - their son Marcin Rz?sa.

Born in 1965 in Zakopane; first he graduated from the "Kenar school", started studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow but after a year he moved to Professor Jan Kucz's studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

Despite the undoubted influence of the sculptor's parents' work, he found his own way of expression. He creates small wooden figures - mysteriously filigree, sometimes lonely, sometimes clustered in groups. An unusual way of depicting man as a silent, anonymous listener, who is not, however, characterized by drama and strong emotions characteristic of Antoni Rz?sa's works - they are, as it were, in a certain opposition - light and airy, giving the impression of being fragile and delicate like fleeting impressions of happiness. They evoke in the audience a sense of a certain innocence, their thin limbs and slender faces, so bright and simple they are like the realization of characters we know from dreams. 

Marcin lives and works in Zakopane, where he and his wife, photographer Magdalena Ciszewska-Rz?sa, run the Antoni Rz?sa Gallery.

Magda Ciszewska-Rz?sa is a graduate of the sculpture department of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, where she graduated in 1999 in Grzegorz Kowalski's studio.

It is not sculpture that has become its artistic language, but photography and design. She lives and works at the Antoni Rz?sa Gallery. From 2008 to 2019 she taught photography at the Antoni Kenar High School of Fine Arts. Her creative activity is connected with her educational mission: she organizes exhibitions, art workshops and meetings with authors. She has had many solo and group exhibitions, including those in Germany, Slovakia, Poland and Belgium.

Her photographs depict a world captured by the eye of an attentive observer, a perspective often devoid of subjectivity makes it an incredible, almost magical world. There is a certain element of rhythmization built through the components of the landscape - sometimes it will be bent tree branches, sometimes creepers covering the walls. 

Within a few decades, the Rz?sa family became an inseparable part of the Zakopane ( and not only ) cultural ecosystem. The artistic values conveyed in it - constantly updated and processed by each successive artist - summ up into a kind of heritage, a family treasure comparable to those found in highland robbery legends.