“Volare” – meaning “to fly”. This is the title of an exhibition presenting paintings by Bogumił Książek, whose vernissage took place at 2:00 PM in the Main Building of our Museum as one of the attractions of Polish Aviation Day.
“Volare” is an instalment of the “Flights” series, originally inspired by the dream of peasant visionary Jan Wnęk to rise into the air. The painter pushes into a surprising experiment within his field, testing how the principles of flying machine design can influence the pictorial effect.
In the case of a painting, however, the driving element is not air but light – whose rhythms and action are an immanent component of the work’s “coming into being”.
The Italian branch of Futurism popular in the 1930s, known as aeropittura, involved professional artists painting pictures based on the experience of flight and the observation of previously unknown perspectives of looking at the world. Inspired by this, airbrush-painted abstract afterimages became an equally important dimension of Bogumił Książek’s paintings, alongside their formal premises, intensifying the impression of lightness and gliding.
![Tullio Crali, Upside Down Loop (Death Loop) (Granvolta rovesciata [Giro della morte]), 1938. Oil on panel, 80 x 60 cm. Collection of Luce Marinetti, Rome © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Photo: Studio Boys, Rome](https://muzeumlotnictwa.pl/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/futurism_aeropittura_crali_aeropittura_di_guerra-761x1024.jpg)
Bogumił Książek is the recipient of, among others, the 2024 Witold Wojtkiewicz Prize for the “Flights” exhibition.
An event accompanying the vernissage was the “Flying Picture” workshop organised in our Museum by the BWA Sokół Contemporary Art Gallery of the Małopolskie Centrum Kultury SOKÓŁ in Nowy Sącz.
During the workshops, participants created their own flying constructions – kites on which they painted their own pictures.
