Józef Antoni Proszowski

Sculptor, medallist, author of monuments and numerous busts. After leaving the Henryk Sienkiewicz Secondary School in Częstochowa in 1925, he started studies under Tadeusz Breyer at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw. During studies he was member of the Sculpture Cooperative ‘Forma’. In 1930 he obtained an award for the 3^rd place in a competition for a medal commemorating the November Uprising. Author of many monuments, among others (together with Ryszard Krzysztofowicz) he made a monument commemorating the Battle of Tannenberg in Uzdów, on the border of Warmia and Mazury  region (destroyed during the WWII). He got the 1^st prize for the monument of Józef Piłsudski in Tarnopol. In 1937 he won the 3^rd prize for the project of Józef Piłsudski’s monument in Katowice and the 4^th award for the project of the gravestone of Gustaw Konstanty Orlicz-Greszer in Oksywie, Gdynia. During the occupation he was active as an artist, and after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising he became a POW in a camp near Wrocław, where he stayed till the end of the war. In 1951 he got a distinction  for his project of Monument of Fryderyk Chopin. In the first half of the 1950s, Proszowski was mainly making busts, inter alia of Fryderyk Chopin, Adam Mickiewicz, Nicolas Copernicus. In 1956 he got an honorary distinction for his sculptures presented in the International Exhibition of Sculpture and Graphics in Carrara, Italy. The artist also took part in exhibitions in Poland, among others in the exhibition Warsaw Sculpture 1945-1958 (1958/59) and the All-Poland Presentation of Architectural Projects at the Zachęta gallery in Warsaw (1951).