...And Beauty Remains: Jewelry Exhibition by Danka Czapnik

The Goldsmithing Museum, a branch of the Vistula Museum in Kazimierz Dolny, invites you to an exhibition of the original jewelry of Danka Czapnik. The exhibition is a special remembrance of the artist, combined with a cross-section of her most important, unique original collections, which have become a permanent part of the history of contemporary Polish goldsmithing.

Independent and Many-Colored

Danka Czapnik was one of the most interesting, most independent and most many-colored creative personalities in Polish design in the field of art jewelry. She graduated from the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, in the studio of Prof. Stefan Gierowski. Although trained as a painter, jewelry design became an important area of her work, one in which color, composition and form remained the most essential things for her. In one interview the artist compared her work to “walking a tightrope,” stressing that she constantly seeks a balance between intuition, emotions and form.

Jewelry Design as a Source of Joy

For Danka Czapnik, designing jewelry was a passion and a source of joy. She stressed that she designs what she herself likes, does not create jewelry according to prevailing trends, and is always guided by her own sensitivity and intuition, her curiosity about the world and her need to discover new combinations of materials, forms and meanings. This creative freedom became one of the most important hallmarks of her art.

The Naturalness and Rawness of Matter

The artist combined a painter's sensitivity with a love of the naturalness and rawness of matter. She combined silver with unprocessed amber, stones, fragments of porcelain figurines, dolls, watch faces, fabrics, buttons, and old useless objects thrown out with the trash, to which she gave new life.

Precious and Ordinary, Important and Unimportant

In her works she set precious materials alongside ordinary objects. She did not recognize a division into “important” and “unimportant” things, believing that any object can become part of a work of art.

A Sculptural Approach to the Material

Danka Czapnik created expressive, large, eye-catching spatial jewelry compositions. Their texture, color and surprising combinations of materials still inspire admiration and surprise, and sometimes disapproval. The artist's work was always distinctive, uncompromising and unruly.

Amber Like Any Other Material

The artist admitted that she treats Baltic amber like any other material. She was fascinated by its rawness and naturalness, but she was not afraid to boldly process it. For her, the beauty of amber lies not only in the natural form of the stone, but also in the possibilities offered by creative intervention. She became one of the pioneers of combining amber with unexpected materials such as colored stones, cubic zirconia and peacock feathers.

The Czapnik Fashion

The works by Danka Czapnik presented at the exhibition in Kazimierz Dolny come from the collection of Prof. Elżbieta Kłosińska, an archaeologist, who built her collection, now numbering 128 works, over more than a dozen years. The exhibition opening took place as an accompanying event of the BNP Paribas Dwa Brzegi festival.

It is worth recalling that works by Danka Czapnik are also in the collection of the Amber Museum, a branch of the Gdańsk Museum, and some of them are currently shown at the exhibition “Gdyński szlif. Gdańska kolekcja” (Gdynia Cut. The Gdańsk Collection) at the Gdynia Info Box. The exhibition, opened for the 100th anniversary of Gdynia, presents several dozen works by Gdynia artists from the 1960s to the present, from the collection of the Amber Museum in Gdańsk.

EXHIBITION: 8.08.2026-31.12.2026
Goldsmithing Museum
Branch of the Vistula Museum in Kazimierz Dolny
ul. Rynek 19, Kazimierz Dolny

We warmly invite you!

Photo: Amber Museum, a branch of the Gdańsk Museum