Alexandra Wejchert

Wejchert held her first solo show in 1959 in the Galeria dell’ Obelisco, Rome. She then returned to Warsaw where she was featured in the National Museum "Fifteen years of Polish art" exhibition in 1961. At this time she was still working as an architect but did not support the social realism of Soviet architecture, which led her to decide to concentrate solely on abstract art from 1963. She left communist Poland in 1964, when she accompanied her younger brother, the architect Andrej Wejchert, when he and his wife Danuta moved to Dublin, Ireland.^[1][4]

She held her first solo show in Dublin in November 1966 with an exhibition of 30 paintings at The Molesworth Gallery. In 1967 she showed Blue relief at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, which was a wall relief of "sculpted paintings" which were precursors to her later free-standing sculpture. Wejchert won the Carroll Open award of £300 at the 1968 Irish Exhibition of Living Art for Frequency No. 5. Also in 1968, she held a solo exhibition in the Galerie Lambert, Paris, becoming a regular exhibitor there.

During this period her work was used as a setting for an electronic music concert with the critic Dorothy Walker noting her designs had a rhythmic quality. From the 1970s, Wejchert won commissions for public art, starting with the 1971 wood and acrylic wall relief in the arts building at University College Dublin.

Philosopher and art critic Cyril Barret wrote:

Alexandra Wejchert's vision is pure; her approach to art is uncompromising; she searches neither to seduce the eye, nor to follow fashion. ^[5][6]

In the same year, the Bank of Ireland purchased Blue form 1971 and then Flowing relief in 1972. Her 1971 triptych, Life, was commissioned for the Irish Life headquarters in Abbey Street. Her entry in a competition in 1975 for a stamp marking International Women's Year, featuring an image of hands reaching for a dove with an olive branch won.^[1][7] The Lombard and Ulster Bank in Dublin commissioned untitled in 1980.

One of her largest sculptures was commissioned by the Allied Irish Bank (AIB). This 11.5 metre high stainless steel sculpture, named Freedom, was erected at the entrance of the AIB headquarters in Ballsbridge, Dublin, in 1985. The National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL) hosts images of Freedom, as well as its construction and installation at the time.^[8] Following the relocation of the AIB headquarters, the sculpture required a new site. In 2021, under a long-term loan agreement between the AIB and Maynooth University, the Freedom sculpture was moved to the Maynooth University North Campus^[9], as a publicly accessible exterior artwork for the community and the wider region.

Freedom is considered to be one of Ireland's significant public sculptures. The unveiling of the sculpture at its new location and the scale of the relocation effort for this large sculpture, is captured in a video, Unveiling of Freedom, produced by Maynooth University. ^[10]

Wejchert became an Irish citizen in 1979, a member of Aosdána in 1981, and a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1995. She was recognised internationally when she was the only Irish sculptor included in Louis Redstone's new directions (1981).

She was shown at the Solomon gallery from 1989 numerous times, including a solo show in 1992. She participated in the Toyamura International Sculpture Biennale in Japan in 1993, with the sculpture entitled The Cave of Dreams.  A number of her most important pieces were for Irish universities, such as Geometric form at the University of Limerick and Flame at the University College Cork in 1995, her last work.

She died suddenly at her home, Eglinton Cottage on Tivoli Road, Dún Laoghaire on 24 October 1995. She had one son, Jakub.^[1] The RHA held a posthumous exhibition of her work in 1995. She had an active social life at her home Eglinton Cottage, and in later years became good friends in both with Imogen Stuart and with Conor Fallon, two well known sculptors in Ireland. She is said to have influenced the younger generation of Irish sculptors, including Vivienne Roche, Eilis O'Connell, and Michael Warren.^[4] Flame was selected to be a part of the Irish Artists' Century exhibition at the RHA in 2000.^[11] A large stainless steel flame also forms part of the Shekina Sculpture Garden collection in County Wicklow.

Some of Alexandra Wejchert's remaining works are occasionally exhibited and sold at Desa Unicum in Warsaw, the biggest and oldest art auction house in Poland.^[12]

Alexandra Wejchert's artworks can roughly be grouped in five main categories: drawings and paintings; reliefs; small sculpture; large sculpture; and graphics. The first four of these roughly correspond to the chronological development of her work, but with some twists and turns, as on occasion she returned to earlier forms of expression later in her career. Practically all her work was abstract in nature.

Her earliest works were initial sketches and drawings. She produced these shortly after her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, during several cultural visits to Italy, and primarily to Rome, in the late 1950s. Such cultural visits were amongst the only ways artists or architects could officially leave Poland for short periods under the communist regime. Her drawings in Italy were primarily studies of architecture and the cityscapes of the time.  

Later, some of these ink drawings, such as of urban housing and cityscapes, later developed into more abstract experiments where she explored and elaborated some of the underlying cubical and geometrical forms. She achieved this by painting sections of small wooden slats in different hues that were then assembled in a mosaicfashion to create geometrical yet harmonious compositions, such as Blue Glowing Form, 1965.

Wejchert also started to explore and paint textured surfaces. A base of sand, small pebbles were set in glue on the top surface of a wooden frame, and were later painted. One of these artworks, featured a pale blue-white elongated prism-eye form hovering above a turbulent dark background. In talking about this work, she said that the pale blue eye to her represented the ray of hope that she saw rising above much of the darkness she had experienced during the war and afterwards during the Communist regime^[13].

Already in 1966 in preparation for her solo exhibition at the Molesworth Gallery in Dublin, Wejchert had started exploring a new technique for wooden reliefs. These works were based on a wooden background frame partially covered and geometrically arranged with sculpted wooded segments. Using this approach, she created a number of oval forms, such as Painted Oval Relief 1996, with a geometrical structure that emanated out of a static, planar background.  

Later, in her entries to the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1967 and 1968, and later for her 1969 solo exhibition at the David Hendriks Gallery in Dublin, her reliefs started to further expand and emanate out of their flat backgrounds. For these she developed her well known dowel reliefs that employed wooden dowels (cylindrical wooden rods of around 2cm in diameter) cut to various lengths and polished to different angles. They were arranged to cover the entire background frame, creating captivating mathematical forms and surfaces ^[14][15], radiating towards the viewer.  

In 1968, she won the prestigious Carroll Open Award at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art that year for one of her larger compositions, Frequency no. 5, a large two-piece dowel composition.

Other reliefs started practically to become sculptures in themselves, such as her compositions employing white spheres contrasted with black tubing. In the Four Dimensional Composition 1969, the background textured surface, already has already become three dimensional in itself - subsequently vigorously interwoven with black tubing, potentially alluding to an imaginary fourth dimension. It is clear that Wejchert's gradual departure from two dimensional forms of expression had become manifest.  

Amongst Wejchert's first explorations in sculpture were created using the material perspex. The material becomes malleable when raised in temperature, and she used this approach to transform previously cut sections of perspex into flowing three dimensional forms. One of these perspex sculptures, made out of two sections, was originally bought by the Bank of Ireland, as part of the Bank of Ireland Art Collection, and was permanently exhibited at their headquarters. Later the sculpture was donated, and now forms part of collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, IMMA in Dublin.

In her book Modern Art in Ireland, art critic Dorothy Walker, wrote: Alexandra Wejchert worked in the unlikely material of coloured perspex. Wejchert's pieces for the Bank of Ireland remain among her best, taking advantage of the malleability of perspex and of its property of showing acomplementary colour along the cut edge.^[16]