EDWARD DWURNIK: SHAME AND PRIDE

The show concentrates on Dwurnik’s (1943–2018) output from the 1970s and 80s, presenting two major series of his: “Sportsmen” and “Workers.” The curatorial intent was to reconstruct the artist’s attitude that he developed at the turn of the 1960s and 70s—opposing the elitism of art, sympathizing with artistic outsiders, conceiving of painterly activity as a document of social life above all. Dwurnik believed in realism in the arts, he considered it egalitarian in that it helped him communicate with the people he portrayed.

The exhibition, while retrospective in scope, is also a starting point for discussing something vital to the Polish identity over the past half-century—that is, the experience of social mobility and remodeled class society. Dwurnik comes across as an insightful and wry artist in the way he probed the impact of these transformations on national and personal identities, on cultural as well as psychological phenomena. The show situates his work in the context of the so-called popular turn, a major shift in Poland’s contemporary culture.