Brygida Wróbel-Kulik. Art, spaces, life worlds

Brygida Wróbel-Kulik was born in 1952 in Chorzów. She completed her studies in artistic print graphics with a focus on aquatint, the most picturesque form of intaglio printing, with Professor Mieczysław Wejman at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie). She obtained a second diploma in the field of applied graphics (posters) under the tutelage of Professor Stefan Maciej Makarewicz. She met her later husband, artist Irek Kulik, in 1971. In 1977 they settled down together in Katowice. Their apartment quickly developed into an open and lively space – into an artistic house which brought people together and created and reinforced connections.

The Kuliks had been travelling abroad since the 1980s: first to Greece when they were invited by artist friends for an exhibition in Thessaloniki (1981) and later to Paris. They never returned to Poland after one of these trips. Their path led them to Aachen, where Wróbel-Kulik quickly noticed significant fractures and tensions in the local artistic scene. While this experience moved and unsettled her deeply, her instinct was to take action. In Poland she had, despite the difficult political conditions, experienced an artistic environment characterised by cohesion, solidarity and mutual support. 

Before the feminist artist collective Grenzfrauen (Border Women) was born, an earlier more pivotal moment happened: her “Grenzzustände” (Border Conditions) exhibition received the City of Aachen’s advancement award in 1985. The drawings presented there addressed borders in various respects – territorial, mental, emotional, and existential. Experiences of crossing the border, arrival and departure, ongoing longing, as well as tension and frustration were consolidated into a series of large-format, monochrome drawings. A group of 16 artists began to form around this exhibition, adopting the name Grenzfrauen a little later. It is hard to imagine a more fitting honour.

As often happens in life, family circumstances intervened in career development. Due to Irek Kulik’s job and his pedagogical work the couple moved to Düsseldorf. Wróbel-Kulik studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Professor Günther Uecker from 1984 to 1985. Shortly after, in 1986, her daughter Miriam was born. From this point onwards Wróbel-Kulik consciously followed a principle that remains the guiding theme of her work to this day: Nulla dies sine linea – for her this means not letting a day go by without artistic activity. In the morning she would take her daughter to nursery and then go to the studio. For years she maintained close connections with Aachen, until her artistic path permanently connected her to Düsseldorf when she moved into a studio in the Salzmannbau building there.