ODYSSEY (1997–2012), A SCULPTOR’S SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
Koenig has created a series of larger than life size figures, similar in their general features but nevertheless different physiognomically. He carved them from lime trees, which remembered his mountain dwelling ancestors. Trees that were witnesses, in whose grain was coded his genealogy and the bloody history of his land. They are not sculptures then, not dead pieces of beautifully worked timber, but living symbols, growing out of the earth like anthropomorphic plants. Maybe inherent in them, as early Slav beliefs demand, are the spirits of Koenig’s predecessors, and those from whose ashes they grew. Mysticism? Maybe. Definitely mystery, but isn’t art one big mystery, one big obsession and an attempt to reach the not wholly conscious layers of our personality. An attempt to find the answer to that age old question “where do we come from, where are we, where are we going?” PROF. JERZY MADEYSKI
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