New York-based painter Carmen Einfinger has won an international competition to transform Dolna Square in Gdansk, Poland, into a vibrant outdoor gallery. The only U.S.-based artist selected to participate in the competition, now in its third year, Einfinger’s proposal ranked above those of seven architects and designers from several European countries. Einfinger’s design—“the Scent of Color”—will revitalize the green space, a terminus for one of the city’s public buses in the neglected Lower City District, making it a bright, welcoming, gathering point. The project is slated for completion in 2011.
“There will be a feeling of harmony beauty and playfulness, which is central to my desire to create art. At first glance, the park may evoke graffiti, but upon closer inspection it will reveal a more orderly and primal way of scribbling and coloring to create a fanciful dream-like world, an imaginary city where diversity is a cause for hope and creative expression,” said Einfinger.
Einfinger will redesign of the Dolna Square as a festive oasis, incorporating a bus stop, kiosk, a garden, benches, lampposts and trees be-decked with birdhouses, a fountain, and a serpentine walkway in lively colors and undulating, organic patterns. Inspired by the exuberance of Gdansk’s Kameralna Restaurant and of pop and youth culture, her design reflects the city’s potential for rebirth as an aesthetically sophisticated environment. Einfinger’s transformation of public space through sensuous color and form recalls the work of Gaudi in Barcelona, Hundertwasser in Vienna, and Nikki de Saint Phalle in Paris.
In the artist’s statement she submitted for the competition, Einfinger points out that Gdansk was a lynchpin in the fall of communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka and the wellspring of the peaceful solidarity movement that led to the end of communism in many countries worldwide. Her project, she said, will “transform the currently neglected and defunct Lower Town into a spatial experience of a crossroad—a moment of possibility that we can universally access through the unusual color combinations and the archetypal forms. I wanted to change this park into a creative force, turning loneliness and idleness into community action.” Birdhouses in the trees, she said, signify the park as a doorway to the world, as their inhabitants bring joyful sounds to the urban environment, while vivid colors and free, whimsical shapes will brighten the spirit. “The space will have an inclusive nature, drawing people of all ages and ethnicities,” she noted.
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