Urszula Broll-Urbanowicz was a Polish painter, animator of independent culture, co-founder of ST-53 group and member of the first Buddhist group of Poland.
Born in 1930, she began her artistic activity during the difficult post-war years.
However, he never received commissions from the communist authorities. She was one of the few women who marked the artistic vanguard of the postwar period and the call Katowice underground.
Source: Jelenia Gora Gallery
In 1955, he graduated with honors from the Faculty of Graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (then a branch of the Wroclaw State Higher School of Fine Arts). The art studio, which she founded in 1960 with her husband, became the center of her artistic life. Marian Bogusz y Julian Przyboś, among others, frequented his workshop. In 1967 he co-founded the Oneiron group.
In the 1970s, he began to intensively explore his interest in Buddhism.
While some of his contemporary associates explored the mysteries of the occult, the esotericism and Western alchemy, Broll delved into Indian mysticism, Taoism, Zen philosophy, and Tantra.
He also translated texts from Carl Gustav Jung. His work became heavily influenced by his Far Eastern reading and meditation practices.
In the 1980s, Broll, following a Buddhist community, moved to the village of Przesieka in the Karkonosze Mountains, a place she called her bare spot. At her home on a hill, surrounded by a wild garden, she created meditation paintings, colorful mandalas, and intricate black-and-white ink drawings. In peace and tranquility, the artist dedicated herself to meditation, reaching the spiritual balance.
Broll's paintings, far from art understood as making objects, evolved towards what the artist called art as yoga. This practice freed her from the requirements and criteria of the art world, but also placed her outside the main narratives of Polish art history.
His work can be divided into several stages, from post-impressionism, through inspiration with cubism, to abstraction, informalism and tasseism.
For several decades, his work has been exhibited in many galleries in Poland and from all over the world, both in collective and individual exhibitions. In 2014 she received the honorary badge of "Polish culture merit".
Urszula Broll he died in February 2020 while preparing a retrospective at the Królikarnia Palace Sculpture Museum.
His exhibitions give viewers the chance to experience tranquility as this artist's mandalas evoke anxiety-free longings. They inspire contemplation on the relationship between man and nature, as well as the metaphysical dimension of reality.
