Ida Karkoszka

Ida Karkoszka

The artist drags a sculpture of a horse on the trail to Morskie Oko with her own hands as a sign of opposition to the slave use of animal labor in tourism. She organizes public fur collections to return them to their owners symbolically, and she creates a two-meter statue of a fox with a tail sewn from dead creatures to stop fur farming. Before the holidays, she walks

through shopping malls with a sculpture of a sheep with fashion brand labels sewn in place of fleece and reminds us that compulsive shopping is one of the most essential sources of littering the planet. Finally, she wanders for a year through the debris of the world with the sculptures as a silent appeal to change habits if we don’t want to completely ruin the place to which we owe our lives.

Ida Karkoszka grew up in an artistic environment, but her early interests revolved around the natural sciences. She saw herself not so much in the arts as in veterinary medicine or surgery, professions that make a real difference in saving lives. Although she eventually graduated from the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the studio of Professor Antoni Janusz Pastwa, her early intuitions defined her later artistic choices influenced the corporeal, vital subject matter of her works and determined her perception of the artist’s place and tasks in the world as a public speaker, fighting injustice and striving through art to change destructive attitudes and practices.

Ida Karkoszka draws on the tradition of European representational art. Ida Karkoszka’s sculptures evoke the silhouettes of animals, which are used by the artist to combat mass phenomena at the intersection of power and systemic violence that primarily affect innocent victims. The artist is seen as an animal advocate and ally, as most of her works were included in the fight against bestiality justified by cultural norms. Ida Karkoszka’s works have

been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Center for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, among others. The artist has participated in group exhibitions at Studio Cannaregio in Venice and the Mark Rothko Center in Daugavpils. Her works are in the collection of the British Museum and private collections.

AWARDS, DISTINCTIONS:

• 2015 scholarship from the capital city Warsaw
• 2010 first Youth Award at the FIDEM international medalist congress
• 2008 first place in the sculpture of the year competition organized by OW ZPAP
• 2008 first place in the sculpture competition of the 4th quarter of 2008 organized by OW ZPAP

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:

• 2023 collective exhibition “Let them sew! Contemporary Polish sewn sculpture”, CSW Znaki
• Time, Toruń
• 2022 author’s exhibition “Bestiariusz”, Pracownia Wschodnia, Warsaw
• 2022 action with Bartek Kiełbowicz “Have we done enough”, Warsaw
• 2022 group exhibition “New Spirituality”, Mark Rothko Center, Daugavpils
• 2022 collective exhibition “Let them sew! Contemporary Polish sewn sculpture”, Studio
• Cannaregio, Venice
• 2021 group exhibition “Manifesto for a better life”, Salon Gallery of the Academy,
• Warsaw
• 2021 author’s exhibition “Till it’s gone”, Polish Sculpture Center, Orońsko
• 2020 collective exhibition “Something in Common” Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw
• 2020 collective exhibition, 9th Youth Triennial in Orońsko “While we live”, Centrum
• Polish Sculpture, Orońsko
• 2020 author’s exhibition “The exhibition that no one will see”, Center of Polish Sculpture,
• Orońsko
• 2019 “The Role Reversed” action, route to Morskie Oko, Zakopane

Works in museum collections

British Museum