Stanisław Kulon
“Prof. Stanisław Kulon was born in 1930 in Sobiesk in the Eastern Borderlands. In 1940, he and his family were transported by the Soviets to Siberia, where he lost his parents and three siblings. He returned to Poland in 1946. Initially, he stayed in an orphanage in Sopot, then he studied under Prof. Antoni Kenar at the Secondary School of Art Techniques in Zakopane, which he graduated in 1952. In 1952-1958 he studied at the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the studios of Prof. Ludwika Nitschowa and Prof. Marian Wnuk. He received a diploma with honors in 1958.
In the years 1988-2000 he was a professor at the sculpture department. Currently, after retirement, he continues to create.
The work of Stanisław Kulon is courageous, Polish, full of faith, knowledge about physical, spiritual and moral people; sacred and earthly at the same time. It is a masterpiece in individual works and as a whole. It is European and national. People’s – as in a backwater of Kresy and Mazovia, and at the same time universal. She is steeped in a deep sensitivity to beauty and truth, strong, innovative. Although “written” in perishable wood, it is everlasting. It is an individual manifestation of the artist’s exceptional diligence and creative discipline, and a mysterious continuation of the world’s art achievements.
Attentive eyes will notice features of the art of primitive peoples, Romanesque and Gothic elements, and features of innovative creative experiments of the 20th century. It is an engaged art, rooted in human life and its affairs: great and ordinary, political and domestic. Stanisław Kulon notices and expresses love in sculpture: agape and eros; life and its end, joy and suffering. The structure and its own dynamics of the material-wood is a testimony of the Master’s humble conversation with nature. It is a record of cooperation: finding the “hints” existing in wood, which become personal visions, preserved through arduous, hard work, also physical, and creative search. Stanisław Kulon’s sculptures, even when they are as filigree as twigs, have weight and significance “.
~ Jacek Chromy
