Purification sculpture
Kraków Artists: Painters and Sculptors
A marble sculpture on a platform in the Vistula, between the Powstańców Śląskich Bridge and Father Bernatek's Footbridge, between the Kurlandzki Boulevard (Kazimierz) and the Podolski Boulevard (Podgórze). A white figure of a pig with its limbs raised stands on beams resembling a pyre, on the plinth of the Wanda well. The author is Mateusz Okoński, and it was originally his diploma work at the Sculpture Faculty of the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. Its public debut took place in 2010, when the sculpture was set in the Vistula for one day (28-29 October); it returned for good in 2012 as part of the ArtBoom Festival. View it from the riverbank.
History
A white marble pig with its legs raised upwards lies on beams resembling a pyre, on a platform in the current of the Vistula, between the Silesian Insurgents' Bridge and the Father Bernatek Footbridge. The sculpture is called "Puryfikacja" ("Purification"), and its author is Mateusz Okoński. The base of the structure is the plinth of the Wanda well. Okoński first showed it as his diploma work at the Faculty of Sculpture of the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. It was meant to be a traditional, academic marble monument, but stone proved too easily damaged during river floods, so the artist turned to pressed marble fragments.
The sculpture was first seen in the river in 2010. It was then placed on a concrete foundation submerged in the Vistula for one day, from 28 to 29 October. It returned to the river in 2012 as part of the ArtBoom festival and - unlike most festival installations - stayed for good.
The festival's artistic director, Małgorzata Gołębiewska, explained that the image of an animal on a pyre was meant as a metaphor for freeing the local community from old fears and a difficult legacy. She also pointed to an association with Art Spiegelman's graphic novel "Maus", in which Poles are depicted as pigs. Okoński himself admitted that the idea met with strong opposition in academic circles, and his professors judged the sculpture to be a profanation.
How the sculpture is received is shaped by its surroundings: the nearby former Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, Ghetto Heroes Square and Cricoteka on the other side of the river. Whose image this figure represents and what experiences it symbolises is not imposed on the viewer.
Did you know?
The first showing in 2010 was organised as the last exhibition of Zbiornik Kultury. In 2019 environmental activists hung a banner on the sculpture linking animal suffering with the climate crisis, and in the same year it was also vandalised with spray paint.