Victor Gajda (1938), ROMANTIC, 1973

bronze, width 35 cm, height 17 cm

EXHIBITED:
- Wiktor Gajda. Sculptures and Drawings, September 1995, Polish Cultural Institute, London.

LITERATURE:
- Wiktor Gajda. Sculptures and Drawings, September 1995 [exhibition cat.], Polish Cultural Institute/Institute of Polish Culture, London 1995, repr. p. nlb.

Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1956 to 1962 and received his diploma from the Faculty of Painting. In 1968, in the catalog of Wiktor Gajda's exhibition, Bożena Kowalska wrote about his expressive, violent, erotic-saturated painting that it was "an expression of protest against the aestheticism [...] of the post-impressionist school, which was unfamiliar to the student of Artur Nacht-Samborski." Very soon, however, as early as 1969, the artist exhibited his first sculptures. At the time, in the magazine "You and I", the well-known columnist Jan Zbigniew Słojewski appreciated their "extraordinary discipline and precision." He was also tempted to reflect on the aesthetics of sculpting: "If a head is sculpted, then sculpt a head that would be simultaneously real and unreal, naturalistic and abstract, similar to a human head, and yet different, bursting with some inner dynamism. And well, such are Gajda's heads" (Hamilton, Heads of Viktor Gajda, "You and I" 1969, No. 10).