A painting by Associate Professor of Art Maja Godlewska is on display at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in the exhibition Twentieth Century Women. The exhibition, which runs through September 2021, highlights the work of 23 artists represented in the museum’s permanent collection, “who have made significant contributions to 20th-century modernism and its legacies,” the Bechtler Museum’s press release states.
The exhibition is the museum’s first to focus solely on the artistic achievements by women artists in the collection. Godlewska’s large painting, The Language (1998, 72 X 44 ¼ inches), is on view along with works by artists such as Niki de Saint Phalle, Germaine Richier, Lee Hall, and Bridget Riley. The Language is one of three pieces by Godlewska in the Bechtler collection. Her work can also be found in the permanent collection of the Mint Museum.
“The Language comes from a body of work that I developed right before and after moving to the United States,” said Godlewska, who is from Poland. “I was a transplant, dwelling on the universalities and differences in communication, submerged in a foreign language and its idioms and idiosyncrasies, discovering new codes of being, reading clues and deciphering rebuses of a new culture (or cultures) here in Charlotte.”
Godlewska’s more recent work is the subject of the solo exhibition, Trophy Vistas, on view December 4, 2020, through February 26 at Artspace in Raleigh, North Carolina. Like her Fall 2020 solo show at UNC Greensboro’s Maud Gatewood Gallery, Wilderness, Trophy Vistas provides an immersive experience for visitors, who are invited to navigate extravagant and vibrant labyrinths of color.
“My watercolor paper installations are environments to invite unhurried examination, for the viewer to follow their meandering form and variegated, painted surfaces,” Godlewska wrote in an artist statement. “They are my slow responses to the fast paced insta-consumption of the landscape in the pre-COVID 19 world. These laborious works are meant to remind us of a simple act of being in nature, or really maybe just being. These days we may crave nature more than ever; it has become our safe space, where literally we can take our masks off.”
The installation Islands, from the solo exhibition Wilderness that took place in September 2020 at Maud Gatewood Gallery of UNC Greensboro. Photo by Marek Ranis.