Liaison Officer

A sculpture by Stanisław Horno-Popławski dedicated to the memory of female liaison officers during World War II. Composed of two granite boulders, the sculptor carved the symbolic figure of a young woman directly in hard stone. The material marked in the block flows down the woman’s arm, revealing her breast. The artist rendered the smooth parts of the body and the roughness of the fabric by developing the surface of the form in various ways. The poetic portrait of the liaison officer is reflected in the delicately highlighted outlines of her eyes, nose and mouth. The unnaturally tilted head and closed eyelids suggest that she is in a dream from which she may not wake up.

Stanisław Horno-Popławski, one of the most important Polish sculptors, was born in 1902 in the Caucasus as a grandson of an exile after the January Uprising. He was educated at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts. His artistic career began in 1926, and in 1932 he became a lecturer and professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Stefan Bathory University in Vilnius (now Vilnius University). He moved many times during his life. After spending World War II in an Oflag prisoner-of-war camp, he became a professor at the School of Fine Arts in Białystok. Then he took the chair of sculpture at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and then moved to Gdańsk. During the reconstruction of the Old Town in Gdańsk, he was the principal designer of the sculptural decoration of the reconstructed townhouses. From 1949–1970, he ran a sculpture studio and was the dean of the Sculpture Department at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. For years associated with Sopot, with a five-year interim spent in Bydgoszcz. Stanisław Horno-Popławski died in 1997.

Author: Stanisław Horno-Popławski (1902- 1997)
Date: 1968
Material: granite