K&K Art Galeria » PETER GAWRON

PETER GAWRON

Tytuł

21 September 2026

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CZAS TRWANIA-

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Anecdote in Sculpture

Professor Piotr Gawron’s artistic journey began in Zakopane. In 1966, he graduated from the State Secondary School of Fine Arts, where he encountered, among others, Władysław Hasior and Antoni Rząsa. He then studied at the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1966 to 1972, in the studios of Zofia Demkowska and Tadeusz Łodziana. After graduating, he remained at the university as a teacher. His association with the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts lasted for practically his entire professional life.

The most distinctive area of Professor Piotr Gawron’s work was small-scale sculpture: a modest form intended to be viewed up close, often focused on a single figure, gesture or situation. Portraiture and medal-making also occupied an important place.

The artist did not, however, treat small-scale sculpture as a reduced version of a monumental statue. On the contrary, the small format became a space for storytelling.

In his sculptures, the figure is not merely a solid form depicting a person. Usually, it is doing something, demonstrating something, placed in a particular situation or made part of a joke. The sculpture has an event.The viewer does not need to know the whole story to read the gesture, movement or character of the figure depicted. The form begins to function much like a short story or anecdote.

Movement is also an important feature of his work. Even in small-scale pieces, Professor Gawron often avoided a static, heavy closure of the form.

This is where one of his most distinctive qualities lies: humor combined with an observation of human nature. It is not, however, aggressive or polemical humor. More often, it resembles a good-natured mockery of human weaknesses, ambitions, vanity or behavior. As a result, his sculptures can be understood without any historical background or specialist knowledge of art. The viewer recognizes the situation, gesture or human type, and only then begins to notice the more sophisticated formal solutions. He experimented with space, and his use of the lost-wax casting technique made it possible to create forms that—as noted in descriptions of his exhibitions—can seem more like “drawings in space” than solid, enclosed masses. He painted wooden sculptures and sometimes added polychromy to bronzes as well, using color to heighten the expressiveness of the work.