Ławeczka Studenta, Warszawa

Ławeczka Studenta is Andrzej Renes’s sculpture of a student on a bench at the University of Warsaw’s former library entrance. Its model was Maciej Robak, selected through a campus casting and public vote. Books, Latin sayings, donor plaques, and a mirror-only shoe detail give the monument its wit.

Ławeczka Studenta is a bronze sculpture by Andrzej Renes, showing a student seated on a bench. The figure sits at the entrance to the former University of Warsaw Library, within the university’s central campus on Krakowskie Przedmieście. Notice the small pile beside him: books lie there with an issue of the student paper Auditorium, and a slip pulls from a volume.

The monument began as an initiative of Jarosław Włodarczyk and the academic weekly Auditorium in nineteen ninety-three. Its model emerged from a campus casting: Maciej Robak, then a fourth-year student in an interdisciplinary mathematics and natural-sciences programme, had his face chosen by a public vote. The finished work was unveiled here on the fifteenth of January two thousand three.

The sculpture keeps a playful student joke in its details. A hole pierces the student’s shoe, while writing beneath the sole can be read only with a mirror. Latin maxims are set into the bench, and plaques around it carry the names of people who funded the project. This is a portrait of study life with its books, ambitions, and a quietly mischievous sense of humour.