Dimensions: height 32 cm (with the artist’s pedestal)
Signature: signed on the inside: JSW '79
Provenance
Owned by the artist.
Jan Stanisław Wojciechowski’s sculpture “Before the Catastrophe” captures the mood of the era in which it was created. It was made in 1979, a year remembered in Poland primarily as a time of deep economic crisis and pervasive doomsday scenarios. Fuel and food prices were skyrocketing, and store shelves remained empty. The ruling regime, led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, used the catastrophic state of the economy as one of the pretexts for the violent suppression of the opposition. Far from saving the markets, the military dictatorship drastically exacerbated the country’s economic collapse. It was a time of intensifying conflict—tensions between the communist authorities and the rapidly growing democratic opposition, which was emerging from the underground with increasing boldness.
In 1979, censors ruthlessly cut out from newspapers, books, and radio broadcasts any information about the deteriorating state of the economy, disasters (such as the gas explosion at the PKO Rotunda in Warsaw on February 15, 1979), or the growing national debt. Films and plays that were too critical of the system (the so-called “cinema of moral anxiety”) were shelved (the so-called “shelf films”) or screened in a limited number of theaters.
An extremely important element of the depicted head is the camera, integrated into the face as a single unit. At a time when the official media were distorting reality, every person became a walking recorder. Mental reportages were the only safe space beyond the reach of the censor. Thus, being a conscious witness became an act of courage and vigilance. As Wojciechowski himself says, the “Catastrophes” series is, in a sense, prophetic, foreshadowing the martial law that marked the beginning of the 1980s. (See: Jan Stanisław Wojciechowski, in conversation with Aleksandra Łapkiewicz, Polskie Radio Dwójka, Warsaw, October 9, 2025).
