Jan de Weryha-Wysoczański

In 1999 De Weryha completed a memorial "In Memory of the Deportees of the Warsaw Uprising 1944" for the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial (ill. 18a-c), which consists of thirty roughly hewn granite blocks placed in a row on a surface of polished slabs. Although it looks like a freely conceived Land Art work, it is in reality Monument Art. Symbolically, the individual stone blocks allude to the "diversity and distinctiveness" of human individuals, but their regular arrangement points to the "totalitarian, perfectly organized apparatus" of National Socialist tyranny. The footpath to the memorial, lined with granite gravel, embodies the path "that those condemned to death were forced to follow".[11] At best the material in this work is reminiscent of Rückriem. More significant, however, is the fact that in Poland, unlike other socialist countries, abstract Monument Art was already being practiced in the mid-1960s at a similarly troubled location. In 1964 Franciszek Duszenko, Adam Haupt and Franciszek Strynkiewicz erected a field of three thousand irregularly split stone blocks for a Memorial in honour of the victims of the Treblinka extermination camp. The field was intended to evoke thoughts of a "duration [of remembrance] beyond time" and "make tangible the tragic presence of people walking to their death".[12]  

On the occasion of a solo exhibition by de Weryha at the Galeria Szyb Wilson/Shaft Wilson Gallery in Katowice in 2005, Jan Stanisław Wojciechowski, a sculptor and professor of cultural anthropology in Warsaw, pointed out that in the 1970s when de Weryha was a student in Poland, international modern art was aready being widely acknowledged by academies and galleries. Young artists in particular had made no bones about adapting the various tendencies of contemporary art to their own needs. They exploited the best examples of conceptual art, minimal art, performance, and new media and enriched them with personal motifs, integrating them into other political or anthropological contexts, and turning to new materials or to nature: “Jan de Weryha-Wysoczański left Poland with a baggage of European intellectual and artistic values”.[13]  

On the occasion of the exhibition in Katowice, which took place in the engine room of a disused colliery, Wojciechowski suspected that de Weryha's art would take up a "romantic position" by deliberately opposing his insights into nature to the technical world or to "late Modernism, i.e. the world of globalisation, accelerated consumption and algorithms".[14] This in turn places the artist in a relationship with Installation Art, which traditionally reacts to found or deliberately selected spaces. In her master's thesis written in 2011 at the University of Technology in Radom (Politechnika Radomska in Kazimierza Pułaskiego), Aleksandra Warchoł also notes that de Weryha creates "arrangements in space" in addition to his wooden objects.[15]

Although the engine house in Katowice served only as an exhibition space for the artist, other arguments can also be found for the fact that he consciously reacts to specific spaces with individual installations. For example, he has integrated block-like and round wooden segments into doorways or wall niches (ill. 3, 9, 48), deliberately aligned ground works with the architecture (ill. 6, 17, 59), or integrated them into architectural elements (ill. 8, 14). The above-mentioned "wooden objects" in corners, along walls or around pillars (ill. 7, 54, 55, 65) and the "untitled" works (ill. 11, 30) stacked or grouped on wall sections may also be included here. As ephemeral on site installations that refer specifically to architecture are the cruciform floor work of short birch trunks for the exhibition entitled Objawienia w drewnie (Revelations in Wood) in 2006 at the Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko (Centrum Rzeźby Polskiej w Orońsku)(ill. 53), and on the occasion of Hamburg Art Week 2011, his ground work entitled "Chilehaus five lines, which consisted of laid birch trunk segments that snaked in five parallel lines through rooms in the Hamburg Chilehaus" (ill. 67). The artist called it a "temporary spatial experience".