Andrzej Wróbewski: towards realism
Guided tour by Marek Maksymczak

The meeting, conducted by Marek Maksymczak from the Institute of Arts of the Polish Academy of Sciences, will revolve around the oil and gouache "chauffeurs" by Andrzej Wróblewski, which he will try to place in the context of the artist’s oeuvre.

Wróblewski repeats the motive of a chauffeur using techniques that are different than oil, achieving a significant modification of the driver motive, a modification that corresponds to the overall significance of his works, famous for the diverse media selection. Together with the change of the oil technique for gouache and watercolor the message of the works changes too. This should not be interpreted as a semantic inconsistence between the particular works, but rather as a conversion that takes place in terms of a mutual dialogue, binding the individual statements together.

The "chauffeurs" convey the problem of how to remove the subjectless compositions from the figural scenes – a mechanism aimed at making the pictured reality “more real”. The process begins by an unnatural composition: “Blue chauffeur”, and leads to the realistic work of “Chaffeur in the city.” From this perspective the gouache technique attracts a special attention, given that it constitutes a statement that develops and fulfills the issues presented by the author on canvas.

Marek Maksymczak is an art historian, a PhD student at the Institute of Arts in the PAN academy. He is writing his doctoral thesis on the “Wprost” group, he analyses the Polish post-war art in the context of the socio-political changes, was granted a MKiDN as part of the “Młoda Polska” (Young Poland) project and is carrying the research on the new figurative arts. His works were published in "Biuletyn Historii Sztuki", "Kwartalnik Rzeźby Orońsko", "Quart" and „Znak”.