‘On the occasion of the Czesław Miłosz Year celebrations, Jenny Holzer has been preparing an original light installation which will appear on the Wawel castle walls facing the Vistula river,’ says today’s issue of the Rzeczpospolita daily.

‘Jenny Holzer will come to Krakow for the first time in June,’ announces Magdalena Sroka, the Deputy Mayor of the City responsible for Culture and Promotion. ‘The artist, known for her activity in public spaces, has chosen a fragment of a Miłosz poem. She will use it, in a similar way to her other light communiqués, to ponder the meaning of words. I cannot say which quotation it is yet. I can only reveal that it will show how one sentence can change human life.’

The Krakow part of artist’s ideas will include an original and unique project – a light installation inspired by and directly using work by Czesław Miłosz in the city’s public space. Sensitivity to words is a crucial element of Miłosz’s work. This is what unquestionably has attracted the artist, famous for her unusual “textual” installations, to the poet’s work.

Jenny Holzer is ranked as one of the most outstanding artists of the American middle generation. At the beginning of her creative road she took up abstract painting, to which she gradually introduced textual elements. In the second half of the 1970s she abandoned typically painterly forms of expression and made the written word the basic medium of her para-plastic art. She was the winner of the Biennale in Venice in 1990. In the mid-1970s she made text the most important medium of her expression. The most important creations by Holzer include big projects combining permanent notations of sentences “classic” in their expression, carved on the surface of stone benches with ephemeral electronic inscriptions running on surfaces of walls.



For Krakow instalation is a part of Liberated Miłosz – Czesław Miłosz Year celebration in Kraków, which is operated by Instytut Książki. Projcet subsidised with funds from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.