Maria Wierusz-Kowalski aka Tapta arrived in Belgium as a political refugee at the age of 18, after the
liberation of Warsaw. In 1949 she graduated from the Atelier d'Art
du Tissu of the Ecole
Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture et des Arts visuels(La Cambre). At the end of her studies, she moved to
Equatorial Africa for ten years. Her stay, during which she experimented with
textiles soaked in different materials, profoundly marked her work.
She
initially dedicated her work to textile creations, sometimes using ropes. Her
last major creation in that field was entitled Voûtes flexibles (1983-1985), at the Veeweyde metro station in Brussels.
As of 1980, Tapta made a radical change in her work in order to break
away from a praxis that she considered easy, decorative and enclosed in the
‘ghetto’ of textile art. She then chose to challenge industrial materials such
as rubber, concrete and sheet metal. Her structures, always black, are cut-out
forms that she arranged by exploring space in order to express an energy, a
three-dimensional tension. As of 1993, she integrated light into her works in
order to play with the contrast between matter and immateriality.
As a defender of a pedagogy that encourages
personal initiative, Tapta took over supervision of the Atelier d'Art Textile at the La Cambre Institute in 1976, which she renamed ‘Sculpture
souple’ in line with Robert Morris and his ‘Anti Form’, which questions the
solid character of contemporary sculpture. She has
permanently influenced a whole generation of artists.
