Roots. Bogdanówka.
Stanisław Trybała was born on 28 January 1950 in Bogdanówka, a small Beskid village in today’s Tokarnia commune, into the family of Władysław and Marianna née Hucher. The daily struggle with the rugged mountain nature, the ethos of hard labour, and the spiritual fabric of folk culture — all of this shaped his innate spatial sensitivity and his reverence for wood as the very building block of life. Bogdanówka remained his spiritual refuge, a place to which he returned constantly — both symbolically and in the most literal sense.
Zakopane. The Kenar School.
After primary school, fate led him to the Antoni Kenar State Secondary School of Fine Arts in Zakopane — a legendary institution in Polish artistic discourse. The “Kenar school” combined a rigorous respect for the native tradition of woodcarving with a bold, avant-garde approach to form.
It was here that he learned something that stayed with him for the rest of his life — the truth of the material. Sculpture in wood could not be the imposition of a form; it had to be the result of a dialogue between the sculptor and the structure of the trunk — its grain, its hardness, its natural cracks. He passed his school-leaving exams in 1969.
Warsaw. Academy of Fine Arts.
In 1970 he began his studies at the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. It was a turbulent time — conceptualism, abstraction, and echoes of new figuration clashed in the capital. Trybała kept an astonishing independence in this context, focusing on the classical craft and on human anatomy. In 1975 he graduated with distinction.
The return. Skomielna Czarna.
After graduation he refused the lure of a metropolitan career. He consciously turned his back on the artistic glitter of the capital and returned home, settling permanently in Skomielna Czarna, where he built his house and a spacious sculpture studio. This gesture — a withdrawal from the centre to the periphery — is the key to his art. Skomielna Czarna became a reclaimed territory, a place where he could give himself entirely to work, free from market pressure and avant-garde fashions.
The matter. Linden wood.
He worked in wood, stone, and metal, but it was wood — and especially linden wood (Tilia) — that became his absolute medium. A material with profound cultural resonance reaching back to Veit Stoss; soft, even-grained, allowing the finest anatomical detail. After polishing and waxing, linden wood takes on a silken smoothness — almost mimicking skin.
The sacred.
Sacred art was the dominant pillar of his work. The most important and most often revisited motif was the Pietà. As he himself said:
The theme of the Pietà is profoundly sculptural. The Pietàs are inspiring, because they contain an unimaginable charge of suffering.
The culmination of these explorations was the exhibition Mater Dei Dolorosa (MOKiS Myślenice, 2013) — seven Pietàs created over the course of two years. Verses of poetry were placed beneath the sculptures. The curator, Małgorzata Anita Werner, said of these works that they bore witness to “how one can enter the immensity of God’s love for man and man’s love for God.”
The profane.
A counterpoint to the Passion was the affirmation of life — the female nude. Trybała, with his eye fixed on Michelangelo’s canon, created sculptures that critics called sculpture-poems. His most original experiment was the cycle Muses and Violins — the female anatomy interlaced with the resonant chamber of the instrument: a visual synaesthesia of music and body.
The master they called the Michelangelo of Bogdanówka.
The phrase was coined by the Myślenice poet and critic Emil Biela. He saw in Trybała the same Renaissance pursuit of perfect form, the same reverence for anatomy, and the same ability to release the figure from raw matter. The title — at first poetic — was taken up by the regional press, and it has stayed with him to this day.
The testament. The Stations of the Cross.
In the final years of his life, while struggling with illness, he returned to eschatological themes. His last monumental work was the outdoor Stations of the Cross (2017) encircling the Church of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Skomielna Czarna — austere wooden crosses, sheet-metal protective canopies, and oil paintings of the stations.
Stanisław Trybała died on 28 February 2018. He was buried in the parish cemetery in Skomielna Czarna, right beside the church whose interior he had shaped so beautifully. The Tokarnia Cultural Centre included him in its honour list of “People of Worth.” The Museum of Independence in Myślenice permanently displays two of his sculptures on the second floor.