“Unreal, Yet Recognisable World – Paintings by Magdalena Shummer“
“I am in enormous awe of nature, animals, flowers, and especially trees. Emotionally, I identify with their fate. I started painting when I was 30 years old. I am a self-taught artist. I paint oil paintings and create cutouts. I use sheet metal that I cut into various shapes. Then, I prime them and paint them with oil paints. The cutouts include butterflies, fishes, cats, monkeys, birds, fruits, vegetables, and flowers. There are hundreds of them, individually or in groups. In my paintings, I present mythical themes, like Noah’s Ark and scenes in Paradise, but also feasts and games of joyful animals and people. I get orders for portraits of people and their beloved dogs or cats in their surroundings. It is hard to classify my painting into any category. It is from the world of fantasy, cheerful, colourful, and I like to call it poetic realism”. Text from the Catalogue of Magdalena Shummer’s artworks „Magdalena Shummer. Paintings and Cutouts”
About the exhibition
Magdalena Shummer’s monographic exhibition is another presentation of the achievements of outstanding artists from the circle of non-professional art in the collection of the National Ethnographic Museum, which successively are presented to the public. Displayed works came from the Museum’s collection and from the collections of the artist, private owners, and the Kolonia Artystyczna Gallery in Piaseczno.
The artist describes her style as a poetic realism. However, her works are not only poetic but magical. Shummer’s painting style is characterized by extraordinary attention to detail. It is primarily visible in small elements of fanciful plants or interior details in the background of portraits and genre scenes. The author’s paintings always feature animals – not only beloved cats but also dogs, familiar farm animals, as well as wild and exotic ones, usually placed in a natural setting. They are always the most significant subject in the artist’s paintings, even if they are in the background, seemingly just accompanying people.
About the artists
Magdalena Shummer was born in 1930 in Lubiniec near Częstochowa. She spent her youth and studies in Warsaw and her adult life abroad – several years in Europe and over 30 years in the United States. The artist has been painting for over 60 years, presenting her works in European and American, and since 2000, when she and her husband Wojciech Fangor lived in Błędów near Grójec, Polish galleries.
She briefly studied art history at the University of Warsaw, wanting to get closer to the art. Nevertheless, her painting was born mainly from the heart, without any advice or teachings from her husband, a professional painter. Everyday contact with the artist and conversations about art probably influenced his own painting awareness. As she said, she had everything at hand, a full painting workshop, all she had to do was reach out and paint.
The artist also attempted to paint portraits, often at the request of various people around her. One of the first was a portrait of her father, then of friends and neighbors, and then portraits of American friends, including: the owner of the gallery where she sold her works while in the USA, famous figures from the world of fashion and film, as well as well-known local celebrities. These are often not classic portraits, but rather images in an outdoor setting.
She paints with thin brushes, mainly on fiberboard, and recently also on hardened cardboard with oil paints, but her works also include painted cutouts of sheet metal, in the artist’s characteristic style, with silhouettes of animals. This form of Magdalena Shummer’s work was born during her stay in Soho, New York. While exploring beloved flea markets, the artist noticed flat cutouts made of sheet metal. They were mainly advertisements, signs and pendants, sometimes also human or animal figures, which decorated home gardens and interiors in the American countryside.
Fot. P.Walczak
Exhibition curators: Joanna Kalinowska, Alicja Mironiuk Nikolska
Visual identification: Lotne Studio
The exhibition is financed by the Masovian Voivodeship Government, the organizer of the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw.
