Lost (and Found) Artist Series: Katarzyna Kobro
Art & Life of the Once-Overlooked Avant-Garde Sculptor

Katarzyna Kobro was an important figure of the Polish avant-garde, whose work and contribution to modernism for a long time was mostly unknown outside of Poland. Born in Moscow in 1898 to a Russian mother and a German-Latvian father, she moved to Poland in 1922 with her husband, the painter Władysław Strzemiński. Co-founder and a member of notable national and international artistic groups such as Blok, Praesens, the a.r. group, and Abstraction-Création, Kobro became known for her “spatial sculptures” combining constructivism, architecture, and sculptural forms, and is now gaining recognition as one of the most distinguished female sculptors of the 20th century.

Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński and the a.r. group

Trained at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, in Russia Katarzyna Kobro spent time among avant-garde artists such as Vladimir Tatlin, Kazimir Malevich, and Alexander Rodchenko, working as a theater designer and teaching sculpture at the School of Ceramics. Following the October Revolution, as things got increasingly repressive for artists in the newly born Soviet Union, Kobro and Strzemiński fled to Poland in 1922, where they quickly fell in with the avant-garde and became important members of the Polish art scene. Kobro worked across a variety of disciplines. Her main focus was sculpture, but she also made paintings and worked as an architect, set designer, and graphic designer. 

In 1929, Kobro and Strzemiński were among a group of artists who cofounded Grupa a.r. (“revolutionary artists group” or “real avant-garde”). Led mainly by Kobro and Strzemiński, the group stood for avant-garde abstract art and published articles and manifestoes. In 1931, Kobro and Strzemiński published Spatial composition: Calculating the Spacetime Rhythm, which formed an important contribution to the theory of avant-garde art. 

Museum of Art in Łódź

The couple began to build an art collection including works from European artists they admired and connected to. These artists included the likes of Theo van Doesburg, Jean Arp, El Lissitzky, and Fernand Léger. The members of Grupa a.r. eventually even created a museum for this art collection, the Sztuki Museum in Łodź. It was a fairly unique situation for artists themselves to create such an important collection and museum. Some of the most progressive avant-garde artists were represented in the Sztuki Museum, and Kobro and Strzemiński also added some of their works to the collection. The museum remains an important modern art institution to this day.