Reverie on Suburban Train

The world as imagined by Zofia Gramz is filled with hybrid beings. Her half-human, half-animal creatures with exaggerated, warped, ugly faces bring to mind the bizarre entities that populate the paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. Gramz’s preference for creating hard-to-define figures and her talent for characterizing human types are a part of a rich tradition, reaching from the early-Renaissance visions of Dutch painters, through the fanciful works of Odilon Redon to the overstated types of George Grosz and caricatural likenesses by Edward Dwurnik. Gramz is invariably interested in human beings, their inner world and their relation to what lies outside. Her drawings contain much of herself, her own emotions and views, her joy and her helplessness.

Zofia Gramz’s works are expressive and condensed, at times precise, but often amorphous. Comedy overlaps with horror there, and a gallery of curiosities illustrates social mores. In her drawings, critics find an astute commentary to reality; Gramz herself treats them as “thinking in process”. She declares that her drawings are created spontaneously, with no plan or intention. Yet her creative tools, the ink and the brush, are hardly suitable for the quick jotting down of thoughts and capturing situations. The hundreds of sheets she has filled cannot therefore be perceived to be a sketchbook; they are more like a well-considered bestiary, a treatise on human attitudes. Terse titles are an inseparable element of her works.

Gramz devotes her attention to many subjects. Among them are corporeality and the requirements that we force upon our bodies, usually determined by their media-generated images. The figure of an artist is present in her works in a very particular manner. She examines stock opinions on art and its creators. Her vision extends from a trivialized stereotype to a personal confession. Yet the question what kind of a world, in essence, Gramz presents, remains open. This world may reveal a personal perspective of an artist and a woman immersed in reality. She may also regard the human hive with a distanced eye, and then the grotesque figures serve her to reveal the turmoil under the wrapping of social appearances. Or perhaps she is an inherent participant in the social performance and everything she jots down pertains also to her?

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