Photo report
The Main Building
Exhibition
Maria Ritter. The artist.
The Main Building of the Nowy Sącz Land Museum will host the paintings of Maria Ritter, the most famous and most versatile Nowy Sącz artist. She dealt with easel painting, graphics, sculpture, designing wall polychromes and conserving monuments. During her artistic activity, there was an intensive development of art, manifested by a multitude of new trends and directions in painting. Maria Ritter followed these changes and incorporated them into her work.
She was born in Nowy Sącz in 1899 and spent her entire life here. In the years 1921-1927 she studied in Krakow at the Academy of Fine Arts, learning in four studios: with Wojciech Weiss - easel painting, with Jan Wojnarski - graphics, with Xawery Dunikowski - sculpture, and with Jan Hopliński - wall techniques. She spent the academic year 1924/25 in Paris, studying privately with Fernando Léger and Othon Friesch. She met there with Polish scholarship holders of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, called Kapists, gathered around Józef Pankiewicz. These contacts had an impact on her painting. While in Paris, like many students and novice artists, she trained her skills by copying paintings by old masters in the Louvre.
After graduating, she joined the Krakow group "Zwornik", which brought together representatives of colorism. Color interests were present in her painting until the 1960s. Then her paintings became more linear and flat, the colors became subdued and muted. Many works from this time are almost monochromatic, most often in gray, brown and beige colors. The first abstract paintings are then created. A separate area of Maria Ritter's work are works on sacred themes, in which she developed her own stylistic language, inspired by Gothic and icon painting. Thanks to her versatility and talent, she took on various orders in this field. She made altar paintings, Stations of the Cross cycles, wall and ceiling polychromes, and small altars. Her works can be found in many churches of the Tarnów diocese.
Maria Ritter died in Nowy Sącz on March 25, 1976. Three years later, the District Museum in Nowy Sącz organized a permanent exhibition of the artist's works in part of the apartment she occupied at Rynek 2, located in her former studio. It is also a complement to the exhibition we have prepared, commemorating the 125th anniversary of her birth. The exhibits presented there come from the collection of the Museum of the Sądecka Region and family collections.
Edyta Ross-Pazdyk
Edyta Ross-Pazdyk
