Barbara Levittoux-Świderska

Barbara Levittoux-Świderska was a seminal figure in textile art, transforming tapestry from flat decorative surfaces into inventive, sculptural installations. Like her contemporaries Magdalena Abakanowicz and Jolanta Owidzka, she drew on the Eastern European textile tradition, incorporating locally sourced materials and rural craft practices to experiment with new methods and forms. Over the course of more than five decades, she developed a cohesive body of work that explored materiality, structure, and spatial relationships, expanding the expressive potential of Polish textile art. While her early practice focused primarily on painting—depicting everyday objects alongside geometric solids with minimalist precision—by the 1970s she had largely turned her attention to textile-based work. In her textile practice, Levittoux-Świderska combined natural fibers such as pine needles, birch bark, yarn, cotton, and fabric with industrial materials including wire, plastic, and other repurposed scraps. She wove or glued these elements together to create two-dimensional works that were simultaneously intimate and minimal, emphasizing the spatial interplay between components. Her net-like, densely layered compositions feature imperfect, entangled forms that convey a sense of emptiness while revealing the underlying skeleton of the weave. Through these intricate arrangements, Levittoux-Świderska exposed the logic, rhythm, and thought embedded in her process, creating works that balance material rigor with poetic abstraction. ...