“In her sculpture, she makes only use of fallen trees and branches, re-creating the random look of the forest windfalls or reconstructing trees on the ground in staggered horizontal segments. In the summer 1995, she created a large-scale outdoor installation, Homage to Piet Mondrian, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England, where she was a Henry Moore Foundation fellow. She worked with the local arboriculturist and others to dismantle a dying beech tree that had been planted when the park was designed some 250 years ago”.

 

Cynthia Nadelmann, Joanna Przybyła Forest Arranger, ARTnews, April 1997, New York

 

“What I found particularly affecting about Przybyła’s sensibility is the way she avoids making her trees into something else. They remain trees – not tree people or tree dogs or tree vehicles – but trees. This intense involvement with the tree itself, minimally altered, together with the sculptor’s vivid spatial imagination, makes for work of unusual elegance and power”.

 

Robert Taplin, Joanna Przybyła at Sculprue Center, Art in America, March 1997, New York

 

“In fact, her sculptures are not far from the raw material itself. She barely shapes the huge felled or weather-broken trees (mostly oaks), merely arranging them on the gallery floor along with some architectural fragments (Cathedral II, 1991). Tree of Good and Evil (1989) was exhibited outdoors and consisted of the splinters of a giant tree trunk held together by metal braces.”

 

Ewa Lajer – Burcharth, Warsaw Diary, Art in America, Vol.82, No 2Feb. 1994, New York

 

“In the country with the only remaining primeval forest in Europe – in a land with an old tradition of wooden architecture and a widespread reverence for trees and wood – Joanna Przybyła’s sculpture involves the meticulous reconstruction of a tree in its original setting, or the creation of sprawling installations of tree trunks and branches that quietly insinuate matters of ecology.”

 

Kim Levin in Dossier Warsaw, Poland, Sculpture March-April, 1993, Washington D.C.

 

“Her installations, made from the remains of fallen trees, have a sense of rhythm and unity that expresses the fundamental principles of nature”

 

Josephine Gear, Nature Extended: The Sculpture of Joanna Przybyła,
catalogue Interior, Zacheta-National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 1996