The folk art which will steal your heart!

Roman Śledź lives in Malinówka, Lublin Voivodeship, where was born in 1948. Śledź started sculpting at the end of the sixties but it was many years before his work began to attract attention. Śledź’s work could hardly be described as folk art, and his lack of formal art education made it difficult for him to be taken seriously as a professional artist. This precluded galleries from exhibiting or selling his sculptures. Fortunately, Śledź persisted despite the difficulties and finally saw “Cepelia”, his first personal exhibition, staged in 1978. This marked the turning point in his artistic career. Ever since then, Śledź’s art has been widely exhibited and his works grace museums and private collections in Poland and abroad. He has also sculpted the Stations of the Cross for a couple of churches in Germany. Success has not changed Śledź’s approach to his art. He can still experience the intensity of Golgotha as is so painfully evident in the authenticity and sensitivity of the agony and torment etched into the figures he creates with such harmony of composition.

Śledź sculpts multifigure compositions and is a master with colour. He is attracted to mournful and painful themes steeped in faith and based on a permanent contemplation of Gospel truth. Śledź does not view his inspiration in the church as iconographic. His compositions are born of personal interpretations of deeply felt religious texts.