Urszula Danielewska-Wietecka died on December 5th, 2015 – she was a visual artist, a fashion designer, an interior designer, a painter. That was the order in which the family put the artist’s specialisations in her obituary. For me, Urszula was first and foremost a painter, maybe because we met after 1980, in a period when painting was the most important for her.
In 1980, she was at a 3-month scholarship in Regensburg, where — in confrontation with the German art —she rediscovered the essence of painting. She began to create large format, figurative images built with pure colours, in which she combined anecdote with humour, with a degree of irony, with caricature. The figures she painted, mostly female and animal ones, presented generally against neutral backgrounds, are the dominant feature of the compositions. She very often painted a woman with a dog — herself with her beloved dog. She created a series of very personal images, based on the expression and distortion of the form. The line that creates the tension in an image is crucial — the line that belongs to the artist.
It’s because Urszula for many years used to primarily draw, using delicate, airy lines and strokes. She used to create small works, biological in their structure; after 1976, their message became metaphoric and surreal, they got bigger in format and started touching upon the essence of life. That sphere of her activities has been forgotten, dominated by her painting art — by the images from the 1980s and 1990s, in which she created a very characteristic, recognisable formula.
/Elżbieta Kantorek/
Urszula Danielewska-Wietecka was born on February 9th, 1942, in Bydgoszcz. In 1961-1966, she studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. She graduated with a diploma in painting in 1966, under the supervision of Prof. Stanisław Borysowski. In 1966-1980, she was mainly preoccupied with fashion design and advertising graphics, as well as painting. Since 1980, she devoted herself exclusively to creative work (drawing, painting). In 1980, she went for an artistic scholarship in Regensburg (Germany). In 1984, she was a holder of the Ministry of Culture and Art’s grant. In 1987, she became an expert of the Ministry of Culture and Art, specialised in assessment of contemporary art — painting. She also received the grant of the voivode of Bydgoszcz. As a part of a cultural exchange, she went on study trips to Vietnam (1986) and the Soviet Union (1987). In 1988, she was awarded a grant by the city of Speyer and the Ministry of Culture of the Rhineland-Palatinate (Germany). In 1991, she opened her own gallery: Art-Deco-Gallery. Since 2000, she designed and arranged interiors. She was the author of some 40 individual exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions. Her works are in the collections of the Leon Wyczółkowski District Museum in Bydgoszcz, Municipal Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz, Ignacy Jan Paderewski Pomeranian Philharmonic in Bydgoszcz, and in many private collections in the country and abroad. She died on December 5th, 2015, in Bydgoszcz.
