Anka Ptaszkowska (1935-2025)

"With her death, an era has ended and, for many of us, a link to avant-garde experimentation has been broken. We bid farewell to Anka and her singular approach to the world, which revolved around demanding the impossible and refusing to compromise. As one of the cultivators of Situationism, she was constantly ready to put forward new postulates, as if she were trying to make May 1968 last forever."

"Anka studied art history at the Catholic University of Lublin, one of the few Polish universities that offered intellectual freedom, however limited, during the Stalinist era. Together with Jerzy Ludwiński she founded the magazine Struktury (Structures), which followed the artists of the Grupa Zamek (Castle Group) as they experimented with matter painting in the late 1950s and early '60s."

"In 1966, alongside Wiesław Borowski and Mariusz Tchorek, she cofounded the influential Foksal Gallery—perhaps the only avant-garde gallery in the Communist Bloc to experiment not only with Happenings, environments, and Conceptual or ephemeral art, but also with conventional exhibition routines and institutional limitations."

Anka Ptaszkowska (1935-2025) was a pivotal figure in Polish avant-garde art who studied at Catholic University of Lublin during the Stalinist era. She co-founded Struktury magazine with Jerzy Ludwiński to document experimental matter painting by Grupa Zamek. Ptaszkowska cultivated relationships with key artists including geometric abstractionist Henryk Stażewski, painter Mewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska, and her first husband Edward Krasiński, whose studios became unofficial Warsaw artistic hubs. She championed Tadeusz Kantor's visual theater and Krzysztof Niemczyk's provocative work. In 1966, she co-founded Foksal Gallery with Wiesław Borowski and Mariusz Tchorek, establishing it as the Communist Bloc's only avant-garde gallery experimenting with Happenings, environments, Conceptual art, and institutional conventions.

Read at Artforum