Titled Divine Justice, the display features works created during the 16th International Icon Painting Workshop, which took place in September last year in Slavske, Ukraine.
The workshop brought together 35 painters from Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania.
The resulting collection has already been exhibited at the Museum of Folk Architecture in Lviv, the National Museum of Przemyśl Land in southeastern Poland, and the Nikifor Museum in Krynica-Zdrój, a town in southern Poland known for its spa heritage.
The annual workshops, organized since 2009 by the Friends of Nowica Association, the Department of Sacred Art at the Lviv Academy of Arts, and the Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Warsaw, provide a space for artists to reflect on faith through the tradition of icon painting.
Their works have been exhibited in more than 100 venues across Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia, Switzerland, Austria and Germany.
Since 2016, the Museum of the Archdiocese of Warsaw has hosted a selection of these exhibitions, presenting themes such as The Psalms (2020), The Word Became Flesh (2021), and Meeting the Risen Christ (2023).
This year’s theme, Divine Justice, was proposed by Kyiv-based artist Albina Yaloza. It reflects on the suffering brought by war and the search for meaning and faith in the face of tragedy.
The exhibition curators, Katarzyna Jakubowska-Krawczyk and Mateusz Sora, president of the Friends of Nowica Association, emphasize the ongoing impact of the war in Ukraine, where daily life is overshadowed by air raid sirens and punctuated by funerals of both soldiers and civilians killed in Russian attacks.
“How can one paint and contemplate icons in the face of such tragedy? Why does God allow this suffering? What is divine justice?” the curators ask in their introduction to the exhibition catalog.
They note that the artists, both Polish and Ukrainian, turned to the Bible for guidance, drawing inspiration from scenes such as the sacrifice of Abraham, Moses receiving the tablets of the Law, Christ’s encounter with the adulteress, the Passion, and the Last Judgment.
The exhibition, co-organized by the Museum of the Archdiocese of Warsaw, the Friends of Nowica Association, the Department of Sacred Art at the Lviv Academy of Arts, and the Research Workshop on Ukrainian Identity at the University of Warsaw, will run until April 14.
(rt/gs)
Source: dzieje.pl