ŚLADY / TRACES Jan Feliks Piwarski Graphic Art Competition 3rd edition
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The Print Room of the University of Warsaw Library Announces
ŚLADY / TRACES
Jan Feliks Piwarski Graphic Art Competition
3rd edition
In graphic art, artistic invention manifests itself as the trace of a tool on the matrix. The matrix, in turn, leaves a trace on paper, forming a print. A print that enters a public collection, leaves a lasting trace of the original artistic idea and contributes to the material heritage of culture. Creative allusions —both subtle and distinctive—between artists, observed and tracked for centuries, are also traces.
The ŚLADY / TRACES Jan Feliks Piwarski Graphic Art Competition was initiated to emphasize and strengthen all these traces: by encouraging the use of traditional graphic techniques, by creating a space to explore the legacy of predecessors, and by opening the university collection to contemporary graphic achievements.
Therefore, subsequent editions of the competition are patronized by outstanding creators whose work can serve as a point of reference for contemporary artists. For this year’s edition, the choice fell to the Italian master of etching, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778).
We expect the works submitted to the competition to confront the artist’s legacy: through dialogue, reference, commentary, or polemics. We seek for creating a creative tension between one’s own work and the works of the predecessor. This can involve focusing on specific technical, stylistic, compositional, or ideological aspects, or taking a broad perspective and recontextualizing the works.
Piranesi’s “black brain”, to use a Victor Hugo’s expression, inspired generations of artists, writers, architects, filmmakers, and, of course, graphic artists. Francisco Goya, Maurits Cornelis Escher, Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, Le Corbusier, Julie Mehretu, Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka – these are just a few of them.
Does the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi still fascinate? Does his eighteenth-century artistic vision of ancient ruins and imaginary prisons carry a universal message, still relevant from the perspective of our complex contemporary times?
Can Piranesi’s etchings be interpreted today as a treatise on the passage of time and the transience of culture, or are they rather a manifestation of a romantic prioritization of dreams and the past over reality?
Can a creator, who so skillfully and to the technical limits exploited the graphic medium, following a path of knowledge and study from nature, be today a commendable example, or does it lead astray?
The collection of Piranesi’s etchings housed in the Print Room of the University of Warsaw Library was amassed by King Stanisław August, who harbored a deep fascination for works of Italian’s artist. We believe that even today, this collection can be a source of artistic inspiration and creative inquiry.
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Invitation
We invite you to view the works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi presented in the UW CRISPA Digital Library and to participate in a display of original prints during the open days at the BUW Print Room in September.
Visit to the Print Room
- September 26: Piranesi in the BUW Print Room – Open Day
- September 27: Piranesi in the BUW Print Room – Open Day
Registrations for viewings will be possible from September 2, 2025, by filling out the form that will be available here.
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ŚLADY / TRACES Jan Feliks Piwarski Graphic Art Competition
TIMETABLE:
- November 15: Deadline for submission of competition works
- By November 25: Announcement of finalists
- December 11: Announcement of winners and award ceremony during the opening of the post-competition exhibition, Exhibition Hall of the BUW, ul. Dobra 56/66, Warsaw
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AWARDS:
- Grand Prix, 1st Prize of the Rector of the University of Warsaw, Prof. Alojzy Z. Nowak – PLN 5,000.
- 2nd Prize of the Rector of WIT Academy, Prof. Maciej Krawczak – PLN 3,000.
- 3rd Prize funded by PHU Beskid Plus Sp.j. – PLN 1,000 and a voucher worth PLN 1,000 for company products.
- Three honorable mentions funded by APA Polska Sp. z o.o. – vouchers worth 500 PLN each for the company’s products.
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JURY:
- Prof. Błażej Ostoja Lniski, Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
- Prof. Krzysztof Tomalski, Copperplate Engraving Studio, Faculty of Graphic Arts, Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow
- Anna Kłos, PhD Plenipotentiary for Graphic Arts at WIT Academy in Warsaw
- Małgorzata Biłozór-Salwa, PhD, Deputy Head of the Print Room of the University of Warsaw Library
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CONTACT
Print Room: gabryc.buw@uw.edu.pl tel.: 022 552 58 34
Promotion, Exhibitions and Cooperation Department: promocja.buw@uw.edu.pl tel.: 022 5525283
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“I crave great ideas, and it seems to me that if I were commissioned for a new project of the world, I would undertake this mad task.”
— Piranesi about himself in a conversation with one of his students
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Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778)
An outstanding engraver and draftsman, publisher, as well as an architect and art theorist born in Venice. In 1740, he moved to Rome, where he worked until the end of his life. His patrons included Pope Clement XIII and the Pope’s nephew Cardinal Giovanni Battista Rezzonico. Piranesi’s graphic work constituted a synthesis and summary of the most important trends and achievements of 18th-century Venetian graphic art. It was also a result of his architectural education, his passion for archaeology and fascination with ancient Rome, as well as the influence of the Venetian artistic environment on the artist. Piranesi’s works are characterized by an excellent sense of volume and space, boundless imagination, and outstanding graphic skill. His most important series of etchings include Carceri d’Invenzione, depicting dark prison interiors with intricate structures, a tangle of stairs, passages, and torture instruments, and Vedute di Roma – a cycle consisting of 135 large plates, showing ancient monuments and ruins of Rome, as well as the city’s contemporary architecture. Piranesi documented ancient and modern Roman buildings in an inventory-like manner, while also manipulating their scale by introducing special viewpoints and perspectives into his compositions. Piranesi’s graphic works were mainly published by Giovanni Bouchard, and from 1761, in the artist’s own printing house, which he ran with his son Francesco. Numerous editions are known, differing in technical details.
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About Piranesi:
Many painters of genius have been architects as well; very few have thought solely in terms of architecture in their painted, drawn, or engraved work. […] On the contrary, Piranesi’s studies as an architect taught him to reflect thoroughly and continuously in terms of balance and weight, of blocks and of mortar. […] It seems in particular that the passion for building, repressed in this man limited throughout his career to the two dimensions of a sheet of copper, rendered him particularly apt at rediscovering in a ruined monument the energy which originally raised it from the ground. We might almost say that the raw materials, in the Antiquities, are expressed for their own sake: Piranesi’s image of the ruin does not release a discourse on the grandeur and decadence of empires and the instability of human affairs, but rather a meditation on the duration or the slow erosion of things, on the opaque identity of the block continuing, within the monument, its long existence of stone as stone. Conversely, for Piranesi Rome’s majesty survives in a broken vault, rather than in an association of ideas with some buried Caesar. The edifice is sufficient unto itself; it is at once the drama and the drama’s decor, the site of a dialogue between the human will still inscribed in these enormous masonries, inert mineral energy, and irrevocable Time.
Marguerite Yourcenar
The dark brain of Piranesi and other essays, transl. by Richard Howars in collaboration with the author, New York 1984, p. 99-100.
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Published: 3 July 2025