Take 5

Lidia Groblicka

_{Children's tree, 1972, woodcut print; ink on paper, 35.5 x 17.5 cm (image); 63.5 x 47.3cm (sheet), artist's proof, Collection of FUMA 1988}

_{The Garden, 1979, woodcut print; ink on paper, 44.5 x 34.7 (image); 63.7 x 50.0 cm (sheet, edition 11/20, Collection of FUMA 1993}

_{Untitled, c. 1970s, woodcut print; ink on paper, 29.0 x 25.0 cm (image), Collection of FUMA 2737}

Flinders University Museum of Art is custodian to 26 prints by Polish-born printmaker, Lidia Groblicka (1933 – 2012). While woodcut was her main medium, the collection also includes etchings, lithographs and linocuts acquired in the early 1980s and 1990s. Grounded in personal experience, Groblicka’s striking black and white works and spare compositions speak of home and family, loneliness and displacement, and human connection to the natural world.

Born in Żółkiew, Poland in 1933 during the The Great Depression, Groblicka grew up in Krzemieniec. Her father was Professor of Natural History at the Krzemieniec Lyceum and inspired in Groblicka a love for nature. Groblicka’s family endured the 1939 invasion of Poland by Germany and then the Soviet Union, and subsequent annexation. In 1944 they fled to Nowy Sącz of southern Poland, which provided comparative sanctuary for the family to continue with their lives.[1] Krakow, near Nowy Sącz is situated at the base of the Carpathian Mountains, the second biggest mountain range next to the Alps. It was against this sublime backdrop of granite peaks with stone pine treelines, and alongside the aftermath of war, that Groblicka gained technical skills in drawing and printmaking at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts between 1951 and 1957. There she studied Polish folk art under the tutelage of leading ethnographer Roman Reinfuss, which influenced Groblicka’s later work, particularly her unity and geometrisation of forms and symbolic treatment of human, plant and animal figures.

Groblicka relocated to London in 1958, married, gave birth to a child, and braved the social isolation and displacement of migration – particularly the confined urban environment of London, which conflicted with her appreciation of the mountains and forests surrounding her homes in Poland.[2] The artist moved to South Australia in 1966 which increased her sense of alienation and rootlessness,[3] intensified by the suburban sprawl of Adelaide and its dry, hot summers. Groblicka’s ruptured connection to home and place both fuelled and gave purpose to her art-making, working from her bedroom studio in her home at the base of Adelaide’s nothern foothills.

In Groblicka’s woodcut, Children’s tree (1972), a miniature home, like a nest, sits inside a tree, its fur-like leaves reminiscent of Poland’s coniferous trees, such as the silver fir or Norway spruce. The sun shines larger than life in this idyllic scene and one stray ray of light morphs into a leaf, a bird’s feather, or angel’s wing. The flat composition holds an emptiness emphasised by the hard-edged black, and absence of colour and tonal variety. A cat and bird flank the tree trunk; the cat’s tail appears rooted in the ground, while the bird’s is both the shape of a feather or leaf. Like the insects in Groblicka’s The Garden (1979), these creatures might be considered human companions or guardians – such as the aniołki (little angels) dispersed throughout the artist’s prints,[4] or the solitary angel with leaf-wings featured Untitled. In Groblicka’s works, animal, tree and human life and spirit seem to interconnect.

Inside the tiny home of Children’s tree, one might imagine a family going about their day, precariously balanced and isolated from suburbia as in Groblicka’s Home (1969) – with its abode and lone figure raised upon a gigantic flower-platform overlooking a grid of uniform box houses. Mother’s tree (1972) however, could suggest an interior vision of these houses in the sky. In the work a woman is perched bare-foot on a tree trunk holding a crying baby with ink-stained hands that echo the dark, protective branches of the large tree. She conjures the image of the Virgin Mary, who in Polish mythology was known to reside in the sacred Linden tree, also known as a symbol of love, fertility, and protection. In Groblicka’s works, references to individual trees speak to isolation and the strength of vulnerability and interconnection, growing strong roots that guide us back home.

Nic Brown
Collections Curator, Flinders University Museum of Art
Adelaide, Australia, 2023

© Flinders University Museum of Art

_________________________________________________________

[1] Adam Dutkiewicz, Lidia Groblicka – surburban iconographer: a printmaker’s view of life from Poland to Australia, Moon Arrow, Adelaide, 2010, p 37.

[2] Dutkiewicz, p 38.

[3] Elspeth Pitt, Lidia Groblicka: black + white, catalogue essay, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2012.

[4] Author communication with Roman Groblicki, 6 December 2023

_{Home, 1969, linocut print; ink on paper, 45.2 x 45.2 cm (image); 63.5 x 62.5 cm (sheet), Collection of FUMA 4704, © the estate of the artist}

_{Mother's tree, 1972, woodcut print; ink on paper, 38.3 x 25.5 cm (image); 64.0 x 42.5 cm (sheet), Collection of FUMA 1985, © the estate of the artist}