Truth of the material.
He never let go of the years he had spent at Kenar’s school in Zakopane. There he was taught that sculpture in wood is not a fight against matter — it is a dialogue. The trunk has its grain, its cracks, its zones of hardness. The sculptor must attune himself, listen. For decades, Trybała worked as if the wood itself were telling him what shape was already inside it — he had only to take away what was unnecessary.
The studio. Skomielna Czarna.
He built it after his return from Warsaw. A house and a studio at the foot of the mountain. It was not an escape — it was rootedness. Here he could commune with wood every day. He could look at the church for which he had worked his whole adult life. He could carve free from market pressure, free from any need to explain why, in the 21st century, he was still sculpting Pietàs.
Two poles.
Critics often noted his characteristic contrast. On one side — the sacred. Pietà, Crown of Thorns, Cross, Pensive Christ. Raw force, real pain, nothing of the merely devotional. On the other — affirmation: the female torso, the nude as a tribute to anatomy, the surface polished to the silken smoothness of skin.
These two poles did not exclude one another. They were two sides of the same sensibility — for a man who knew that wood (once alive) and the body (about to die) speak of the same thing.
Synaesthesia.
The most personal works in his oeuvre were the Violins and the Muses. The female body interlaced with the resonant chamber of an instrument. The curve of a hip flowing into the curve of a cello. A silence in which one can almost hear music. Emil Biela called these works sculpture-poems — and the term has stuck.
Modesty.
He spoke little. Exhibitions were always opened by others — curators, critics, mayors. He stood to the side, listening. Asked about the Pietàs, he said only: “The theme of the Pietà is profoundly sculptural. The Pietàs are inspiring, because they contain an unimaginable charge of suffering.” And that was enough. The rest was in the wood.
