Olga Wolniak
Carpet - Runner
FSP ING 0026
In her painting, Olga Wolniak is frequently inspired by arts and crafts and assorted textiles. In the case of this particular piece, the artist replicated an Oriental carpet pattern in reference to the role and importance of women whose invisible hands are used to produce textiles. “I would love to elevate their labour to the highest rank of all—that of an artwork,” Wolniak explains. The Carpet-Runner also points to the presence of other cultures, one of the indiscernible elements embedded in everyday Polish reality.
Olga Wolniak
b. 1957, Rangoon, Burma
Painter. A painting graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, she began her career with paintings resembling collages, later shifting to social realism tropes. Her work is a commentary on socially important themes, and post-1995 works in particular reference the discussion of women’s emancipation and roles traditionally assigned to women. She creates large-format canvases with Far Eastern textile motifs (carpets, runners and kilims), as well as Polish lace, in a gesture of reducing anthropological explorations to a painted symbol. She lives and works in Warsaw.
b. 1957, Rangoon, Burma
Painter. A painting graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, she began her career with paintings resembling collages, later shifting to social realism tropes. Her work is a commentary on socially important themes, and post-1995 works in particular reference the discussion of women’s emancipation and roles traditionally assigned to women. She creates large-format canvases with Far Eastern textile motifs (carpets, runners and kilims), as well as Polish lace, in a gesture of reducing anthropological explorations to a painted symbol. She lives and works in Warsaw.