Alexandra Wejchert (16 October 1921 – 24 October 1995) was a Polish-Irish sculptor, known for her use of perspex (plexiglass), stainless steel, bronze and neon colours.

Early life Alexandra Wejchert was born in Kraków, Poland on 16 October 1921. She was the oldest of five children to Tadeusz and Irena Wejchert (née Mojgis). Tadeusz ran a shipping business in Gdansk where the family lived until 1939. The family left just before the Nazi invasion of the Free City of Gdansk on 1 September 1939, to move in with Tadeusz's brother, Kazimierz, who was then living in Warsaw.

Alexandra Wejchert later entered the University of Warsaw to study architecture, and while there witnessed the German occupation of Poland during World War II. Memories of the war, and later, of the oppression of the communist regime, remained with her for the rest of her life.book Personal Communication – Jakub Wejchert The wartime period significantly disrupted her studies, but she finally graduated in 1949, subsequently to work as a town planner and architect in Warsaw. Still not having found her true path in life, she went on to study art, and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1956.

From the mid-1950s up to 1965, Alexandra Wejchert lived with her partner Janusz Dmowski an architect, in central Warsaw. They resided in a loft apartment in ,Personal Experience – Jakub Wejchert that backs onto the historical and now fashionable street Nowy Świat. In 1964 her younger brother Andrzej Wejchert commenced architectural practice in Ireland, on the strength of winning the International Architectural Competition for the new University College Dublin campus. Andrzej went on to become a respected architect in Ireland and the architectural practice he established with his wife Danuta continues today. Her nephew Jan Wejchert later became an important businessman in Poland, spearheading the ITI and TVN media and television networks in Poland – which became symbols of free media amid the fall of the communist regime and subsequent economic liberalisation.

In the late 1950s Alexandra Wejchert travelled to Italy, where she sketched and painted, and held one of her first exhibitions. In 1961 she gave birth to her son Jakub. Increasingly, she could not bear living under the communist regime and in 1965 she left Poland with her son to move to Paris, and then later to Ireland.

Career

Wejchert held her first solo show in 1959 in the Galeria dell’ Obelisco, Rome. She then returned to Warsaw where she was featured in the National Museum "Fifteen years of Polish art" exhibition in 1961. At this time she was still working as an architect but did not support the social realism of Soviet architecture, which led her to decide to concentrate solely on abstract art from 1963.

She left communist Poland in 1965, and later accompanied her younger brother, the architect Andrej Wejchert, and his wife Danuta who had moved to Dublin, Ireland, the year previously.

She held her first solo exhibition Alexandra Wejchert Exhibition Catalogue, Molesworth Gallery 1966 NIVAL - the National Irish Visual Arts Library in Dublin in November 1966 with an exhibition of 30 paintings at The Molesworth Gallery. In 1967 she showed Blue relief at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, which was a wall relief of "sculpted paintings" which were precursors to her later free-standing sculpture. Wejchert won the Carroll Open award of £300 at the 1968 Irish Exhibition of Living Art for Frequency No. 5. Also in 1968, she held a solo exhibition Tableaux de Alexandra Wejchert, Exhibition Catalogue, Galerie Lambert 1968. NIVAL - the National Irish Visual Arts Library in the Galerie Lambert, Paris, becoming a regular exhibitor there. In 1969 she held a large solo exhibition of 30 reliefsAlexandra Wejchert Exhibition of Reliefs, Exhibition Catalogue David Hendriks Gallery 1969. NIVAL - the National Irish Visual Arts Library at the David Hendriks Gallery in Dublin.

During this period her work was used as a setting for an electronic music concert with the critic Dorothy Walker noting her designs had a rhythmic quality. From the 1970s, Wejchert won commissions for public art, starting with the 1971 wood and acrylic wall relief in the arts building at University College Dublin. In the same year, 1971, the Bank of Ireland purchased Blue form 1971 and then Flowing relief in 1972. Her 1971 triptych, Life, was commissioned for the Irish Life headquarters in Abbey Street. Her entry in a competition in 1975 for a stamp marking International Women's Year, featuring an image of hands reaching for a dove with an olive branch won. The Lombard and Ulster Bank in Dublin commissioned Untitled, a large, a large diamond-shaped stainless steel relief, in 1980.

Philosopher and art critic Cyril Barret wrote:

"Alexandra Wejchert's vision is pure; her approach to art is uncompromising; she searches neither to seduce the eye, nor to follow fashion". Endorsement by Cyril Barrett at the artist's solo exhibition at the Galerie Lambert, 1968  (translated from French) One of her largest sculptures was commissioned by the Allied Irish Bank (AIB). This 11.5 metre high stainless steel sculpture, named Freedom, was erected at the entrance of the AIB headquarters in Ballsbridge, Dublin, in 1985. The National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL) hosts a page dedicated to Alexandra Wejchert with a collection of images of her and her work, as well images of Freedom, and its construction and installation at the time. Following the relocation of the AIB headquarters, the sculpture required a new site. In 2021, under a long-term loan agreement between the AIB and Maynooth University, the Freedom sculpture was moved to the Maynooth University North Campus, as a publicly accessible exterior artwork for the community and the wider region.

Freedom is considered to be one of Ireland's significant public sculptures. The unveiling of the sculpture at its new location and the scale of the relocation effort for this large sculpture, is captured in a video, Unveiling of Freedom, produced by Maynooth University.

Wejchert became an Irish citizen in 1979, a member of Aosdána in 1981, and a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1995. In the late 60s and early 70s, she lived worked at no.14 The Rise (previously known as McCoy Park), Dalkey in South County Dublin. Later in the mid 70s she moved to Eglinton Cottage, Tivoli Road, Dún Laoghaire, where she had an art studio constructed.

She was recognised internationally when she was the only Irish sculptor included in Louis Redstone's new directions (1981). In his book, Contemporary Irish Art: A Documentation, critic Roderick Knowles assessed that:

"She is among the original and powerful sculptors working in Ireland today".

She was shown at the Solomon Gallery from 1989 numerous times, including a solo show in 1992. She participated in the Toyamura International Sculpture Biennale in Japan in 1993, with the sculpture entitled The Cave of Dreams. A number of her most important pieces were for Irish universities, such as Geometric form at the University of Limerick and Flame at the University College Cork, Anatomy Department in 1995, her last work. She died suddenly at her home, Eglinton Cottage on Tivoli Road, Dún Laoghaire on 24 October 1995. She is survived by her son, Jakub, and his family.

Several posthumous exhibitions took place to celebrate her work, including: a posthumous exhibition of her work in 1995 at the Royal Hibernian Academy; at Women Sculptors Exhibition in June 1996Women Sculptors Exhibition Catalogue, Solomon Gallery 1996 NIVAL - the National Irish Visual Arts Library at the Solomon Gallery; and at the Boyle Arts Festival in 1996.

She had an active social life at her home Eglinton Cottage, and in later years became good friends with both Imogen Stuart and with Conor Fallon, two well known sculptors in Ireland. She is said to have influenced the younger generation of Irish sculptors, including Vivienne Roche, Eilis O'Connell, and Michael Warren. Flame was selected to be a part of the Irish Artists' Century exhibition at the RHA in 2000. A large stainless steel flame now also forms part of the Shekina Sculpture Garden collection in County Wicklow.

One of her smaller sculptures in bronze was selected as the graphic symbol of the Polish Business Roundtable award, a prestigious Polish award for outstanding business people and social activists. A replica of the sculpture is used as the award trophy.

Today, some of Alexandra Wejchert's remaining works are occasionally exhibited and sold at Desa Unicum in Warsaw, the biggest and oldest art auction house in Poland.

Works Alexandra Wejchert's artworks can roughly be grouped in three main categories: drawings and paintings; reliefs; large and small sculpture. The artist also created a small number of graphics prints. The three categories roughly correspond to the chronological development of her work, but with some twists and turns, as on occasion she returned to earlier forms of expression later in her career. She mainly used the materials of wood, perspex, bronze, brass and stainless steel. Practically all her work is abstract in nature.

Drawings and Paintings

Her earliest works were initial sketches and drawings. She produced these shortly after her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, during several cultural visits to Italy, primarily to Rome, in the late 1950s. Such cultural visits were amongst the only ways artists or architects could officially leave Poland for short periods under the communist regime. Her drawings in Italy were primarily ink-on-paper studies of architecture and the cityscapes of the time.  Later, some of these ink drawings, such as of urban housing and cityscapes, later developed into more abstract experiments and paintings, in which she explored and elaborated some of the underlying cubical and geometrical forms. She achieved this by painting sections of small wooden slats in different hues that were then assembled in a mosaic fashion to create geometrical yet harmonious compositions, such as Blue Glowing Form, 1965. She went on the create some further paintings using the same technique, such as depicted the cover catalogue of her first solo exhibition in Ireland at the Molesworth Gallery in 1966. Wejchert also started exploring painted textured surfaces, in a style closely related to that of her paintings. A base of sand, small pebbles were set in glue on the top surface of a wooden frame. This raw, textured surface was then later painted. One of these artworks, featured a pale blue-white elongated prism-eye form hovering above a turbulent dark background. In talking about this work, she said that the pale blue eye represented the ray of hope that she saw rising above much of the darkness she had experienced during the war and afterwards during the Communist regime.Personal Communication with Jakub Wejchert c.1980 Her art became a way of moving beyond her past, to a future that explored completely new horizons.

Reliefs

Already in 1966 in preparation for her solo exhibition at the Molesworth Gallery in Dublin, Wejchert had started exploring a new technique for wooden reliefs. These works were based on a wooden background frame partially covered with geometrically arranged, finely sculpted smooth wooded segments. Using this approach, she created a number of reliefs, including oval forms, such as Painted Oval Relief 1996, with a repeating vertical geometrical pattern that emanated out of a static, planar background.