When he arrived in Chicago in 1980, Jerzy Kenar visited a friend who had emigrated from Poland years earlier, a professor at the School of the Art Institute, who told him, ‘Go back to Poland, because America is cruel to artists.’ I could not understand why he was so bitter. But I could not adopt his attitude. I did not want to be an ’emigre artist,’ but an artist in America.” Kenar, who works primarily in wood, says that here he became “like a wild dog, smelling and being intoxicated by all the different cultures.”
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Kenar left Poland in 1973, quitting the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdansk. Poland, he says, prevented “the development of an independent spirit.” He settled first in Sweden for six years, becoming part of a long tradition of emigre Polish artists. In Great Britain before World War II, for instance, Polish artists’ unions, schools, and other associations flourished. In the 1970s many Polish artists went to France, where they engaged in more political activity, such as creating poster art and leaflets for mass distribution. In recent years many artists have been emigrating to America, and to Chicago in particular.
Underfoot in the vestibule of the gallery is a Kenar mosaic of jet black marble that subtly guides a visitor toward large oak doors inlaid with black ivory and into the vast gallery space and his office. The current exhibit, four years in the making, is “Voices From My Childhood,” 18 large-scale abstract wood sculptures by Kenar. It is his seventh show in Chicago.
You have to leave the gallery and walk up to the roof to see the most intriguing piece in the exhibit, Waiting for an Angel. Made of Alaskan cedar, it’s an exquisite 25-foot undulating ladder, the last ten feet without rungs, that soars into the sky. It’s a dramatic leap into a spirited, mature aesthetic.
