Welcome to the exhibition – Andrzej Wróblewski and Beyond… the Art of Direct Realism.

It showcases a range of works by a man who, despite living only thirty years, is remembered as one of the finest Polish painters of the postwar era. His highly personalised work is loaded with profound meaning. Although he looks focused and composed in his Serene Self-Portrait, Wróblewski was a rebel. He sought his own way of depicting the world around him and his work vacillated between abstraction and figuration. Many artists in the decades that followed have looked to the works of Andrzej Wróblewski as a source of inspiration and a standard to which they can aspire. Their work is a wonderful addition to the exhibition.

Learn more about Andrzej Wroblewski and the artists who followed in his footsteps by reading our brief biography.

The tour starts with a section called Cosmos: Creation and Catastrophe, which can be found to the right of the entrance.

A formative step in Wróblewski’s development as an artist was a three-month trip he took to the Netherlands for World Student Relief in 1947. While he was a student of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, he also travelled to Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Prague. His extensive museum-going education exposed him to both the old masters and the 20th-century European avant-garde.

After 1945, artists who had lived through the war tried to make sense of what they had seen and felt. The world they had known prior to 1939 had been shattered beyond repair. As a result, it’s possible that non-figurative art was the only way to convey both reality and artists’ feelings.

After moving back to Poland, Wróblewski stopped painting the nudes and still lifes he had been doing. Instead, he focused on geometric abstractions. They illustrated how the postwar international system was structured. The new order was presented as uncertain and unknown, but

at the same time a hope for change and stability. Examples of works from this period include Segments and Grey Geometric Abstraction. Here, the multicoloured fields’ distinct borders make it impossible for any one colour to spread beyond them. Visible here are references to the tradition of Neoplasticism and the influence of the paintings of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg.

Segments represents an irregular mosaic of scattered geometric figures. The colourful triangles, rectangles and squares only seem cheerful in their fever of colours. In reality, it’s a scattered world. The roofs, windows, towers, and chimneys of the buildings have disintegrated into an incoherent jumble of figures. Perhaps in Segments Wróblewski attempted to reassemble a fairytale world, but after witnessing the horrors of war, it was impossible to do so.

Let’s now look at the wall behind us.

Wróblewski’s work borrowed from the avant-garde of the interwar period by using symbols of the cosmos. References to the cosmos, planets, and stars were meant to imply structure and hierarchy but also stoked apprehension about the uncharted and unknowable. The use of sharp geometric shapes that are “sunk” into otherwise round and smooth backgrounds gives the viewer a sense of unease.

A sense of motion, oscillation, and spinning is conveyed by the small and numerous figures (primarily squares, triangles, and trapezoids) inside the circle in his painting Earth. The purpose of this was to demonstrate the unfathomable horrors of World War Two. The symbol of the sphere, intended to express harmony, is now a symbol of decay. The painting thus veers back and forth between abstract and symbolic representation.

Let’s head over to the painting to the left of the passage leading to the next zone.

In 1945, Andrzej Wróblewski left his home city of Vilnius and moved to Kraków. The young artist’s memory was seared with the image of devastated cities and the events of the occupation years. The canvases he created depicting ‘sunken cities’ express nostalgia for a place that no longer existed. All that was left were ruins, and memories of people who had passed away.

Wróblewski’s Sunken Cities demonstrates his pursuit of personal expression while also showing the influence of modern art movements like surrealism and geometric abstraction. It is not uncommon here to see silhouettes of fish against a background of simplified, geometricised buildings. Shoals of colourful creatures, suspended in time, seem doomed to perpetually cluster and disperse. Without the safety of their submerged homes, they must endure the bleak, bottomless depths of the lake. The artist explored the impact of postwar art trends and his own wartime experiences through his own unique lens.

On the other side, we find the work Newly Purchased Car, which introduces us to the next zone – Vehicles.

Art was a way for Wróblewski to convey his feelings and establish a new order; he sought to do so in a bold, contemporary style. In 1948, he began the series ‘Chauffeurs’, which used Orphic, eschatological symbolism. Lone travellers depicted from behind against an endless, empty landscape.

In Blue Chauffeur we see a highly geometrical interior of a bus. The blue figure of the chauffeur can be seen on the right, while an unmarked blue clock in the driver’s compartment can be seen on the left. We are outside of time, but also outside of a specific place. A leaden white ‘desert’ landscape can be seen through the window, with only the diagonal lines of the road and the horizon separating the earth from the red sky providing any sense of topography. The abandonment of the landscape is extremely significant here. The first thoughts that come to mind when viewing this piece are of a road that leads nowhere, of limitlessness, of emptiness, of isolation. Also notable is the driver with his back turned to the viewer, anonymous and impersonal. Sadness and horror are amplified by the colour scheme of blue and navy. The viewer is left wondering whether or not the driver is actually crossing over into another realm, and whether or not the painted figure is still alive. Is it a metaphor for the journey of the soul, with Charon as the driver and the audience members as the passengers, as in Orphic mythology?

Situated on the left, Wilhelm Sasnal’s work engages in a dialogue with Wróblewski’s ‘Chauffeurs’. The painting First of January shows the silhouette of a man in a car against the backdrop of the entrance gate leading to a concentration camp. The vehicle comes to a stop, drawing our eyes to the nearby visual symbols of the Holocaust—the railroad tracks and the watchtower. At the same time, the painting’s disjointed, snapshot-like composition contrasts memories of a gruesome past with recurring concerns about the role of bystanders.

Let’s go ahead and enter the zone labelled Executions to the right.

In his series of accusatory works titled “Executions,” Wróblewski’s theory of “direct realism” found its most potent expression. What he called the season of the dead begins on 16 January 1949, when Wróblewski started work on Executions. After two days, the canvas was ready.

The victim’s dismembered body is displayed in front of the torturer, who is standing with his back to the viewer and slightly out of view. The scene was captured moments before the victim’s body fell to the ground. It is not presented in a natural way; it defies anatomy. The victim’s arms – one without its hand – still hang by the side. This creates the impression that the victim is conscious of what is happening. The cold colours used – blue and grey – are, as in Chauffeur, colours associated with death and departure.

The Gestapo killer was painted from behind, his figure enclosed in a tight frame – from mid-calf to shoulders, making his head cut off. The hand and the gun holster clipped to the belt remain particularly visible. There is a symbolic meaning to the executioner’s anonymity; the criminal is represented as a mere instrument for carrying out death sentences with the means at his disposal.

The Executions series contains work that did not conform to any established patterns. Initially, the paintings aroused astonishment and even rejection and disgust. They were a form of nurturing memory and passing on knowledge of the occupation.

Let’s look at the next work.

Another painting in the Executions series is Shooting Against a Wall. Wróblewski’s work shows clear signs of being influenced by photography. The artist frequently turned to the camera to spark ideas for his works. The influence of photography can be found in Shooting Against a Wall. A young man is shown in realistic colours on the left, standing still and looking forward. The figure on the right, on the other hand, is distorted, unnaturally twisted and depicted in blue. They are shown as positive and negative, life and death. The figures of the dead in Wróblewski’s work are often painted using cool blue paint, as if colour escapes from a person when they die – like a body that cools down after death.

Let’s move on to the painting Child with Slaughtered Mother. 

The painting Child with Slaughtered Mother shows a boy embracing a headless female figure, who, as in Execution with a Gestapo Officer, extends beyond the tight frame of the work. The motherly figure was painted in a lurid blue to emphasise how unreal she was. In this way, Wróblewski uses the symbolic meaning of the colour blue to emphasise the intangibility and immortality of the deceased. The dead body of the woman in Wróblewski’s painting, however, seems remarkably real and tangible through the strong graphite shadow cast on the wall and the stiff gesture of the hand, which appears as if it is reciprocating her son’s embrace.

Artist Arek Pasożyt of Toronto alluded to this painting in his piece Hugging I, which can be seen hanging on the wall to the right. As an artist, Pasożyt carries out, as he puts it, ‘parasitic activity’ – it feeds on the tissue of an existing object. He delves deep into both the painting’s material structure and its symbolic underpinnings, thereby expanding the work’s symbolic meaning. Pasożyt disrupts the viewer’s automatic interpretation of an image and compels them to reevaluate and reinterpret it in light of new information.

Compared to Wróblewski’s work, Pasożyt’s painting is devoid of a female figure. The one in his piece blends into the dark space of the background. The boy’s silhouette, on the other hand, is clear, in a tender gesture of embrace, though he grasps the void left by the loss of his mother. As a token of their once-close relationship, Pasożyt draws the woman’s lifeless hand on the child’s back.

Let’s look at the opposite wall.

There is also a clear reminiscence of Andrzej Wróblewski’s ‘Execution’ in the work  Uzza by Maciej Bieniasz.

A twisted body against empty space is a reminder of the tragic story of Uzza from the Old Testament, who, while supporting and saving the Ark of the Covenant from falling, was struck by fire from heaven because God had only authorised the family of Levites to carry the Lord’s ark. The scene from Bieniasz’s painting is a modern interpretation of the biblical representation. In line with the ideas of the Kraków-based Wprost Group, the artist treated art as a moral message through which he asked about the meaning of innocent death. This painting from the 1960s had a timeless message but also made allusions to current events. The thunderstruck figure symbolised both the victims of authoritarian rule and human reflections on the unpredictability of fate.

Now, let’s move on, passing the passage to the left.

Between the 16th and 18th of November 1948, Wróblewski’ painted Atrocities of War. Dead fish are strewn about a bright, neutral background. Some are decapitated and the red of the mutilated interior contrasts with their green body, which reflects the colour of a soldier’s uniform. It is a picture of a wartime massacre. The scattered fish bodies bear the marks of slaughter. By brutalising his painting, Wróblewski does not speak about the experience of war directly, but, using metaphor, creates a universal image of the cruelty and callousness of perpetrators towards the victims.

In his abstract-realist language, Wróblewski concealed a symbol – a hexagram – which is outlined by the fish bodies. One of the triangles of the Star of David is marked by fish tails, while the second triangles are fish without heads. Wróblewski’s painting may therefore be a direct reference to the Nazi regime’s terror against the Jewish people.

The refusal to accept the events of the Second World War was portrayed through allegory. Fish, which in Christian culture are symbols of life and hope, are depicted as dead, expressing hopelessness, finality and mass execution. This inversion of meaning was a significant factor in the art of subsequent generations, challenging established interpretations by delving deeper into questions of evil and disturbing viewers with perverse images.

Let’s look at the work on the left.

From the beginning of his painting career, Ignacy Czwartos used very sparing means of expression, preferring abstract geometric arrangements. Over time, figures started to appear in his work and he began to explore the cultural heritage of the Polish Baroque, Sarmatism and coffin portraiture. His painting Fish is a testimony to his interest in the memory of the Polish Cursed Soldiers – the anti-communist underground active after the war. The idealised figures are given symbolic meaning by the artist. The figures of the soldiers murdered in 1951 – Mieczysław Dziemieszkiewicz, Henryk Kakowski and Józef Miączyński – are depicted in a similar way to the dismembered bodies from Wróblewski’s series Executions. Czwartos’ soldiers, shown from the front, like hieroglyphs, also allude to the painting Atrocities of War. In this context, Christian suffering leads to national revival by highlighting the memory of dead heroes and their sacrifice.

Let’s move on.

Zbigniew Libera is widely regarded as a leading figure in Polish critical art. In his work, he tackled popular culture and exposed cultural taboos. The term ‘Positives’ is used to describe the photographic process in which the negative is transformed into an image. In front of us is the staged moment of the liberation of prisoners from Auschwitz-Birkenau. However, instead of Holocaust survivors, the photo depicts a group of people in pyjamas and quilts smiling broadly at the camera. Instead of barbed wire, they have strings stretched out in front of them. This reversal of meaning forces us to reconsider the first eyewitnesses to the truth about the concentration camps and the sight of prisoners clinging to life. As in Andrzej Wróblewski’s painting Fish, the experience of trauma becomes an unhealed wound under a layer of massively disseminated ‘cruel photographs’.

Let’s move to the left.

One of the most influential figures of installation art, Mirosław Bałka, experiments with a wide range of mediums. The subject of his work is the particular, multidimensional experience of space and the various ways in which it can be recorded. The artist’s winter visit to Birkenau inspired the video installation Winterreise. It consists of three films, titled Pond and Bambi (1) and Bambi (2) respectively, referring to the name of the deer from the Disney animation whose mother fell victim to hunters. The footage shows the deserted landscape of a former concentration camp, increasingly reclaimed by nature. Trees and snow fill the tranquil landscape, we see roe deer walking, but there is a macabre story hidden in these shots – a pond into which the ashes of cremated victims were poured, and barbed wire separating the reality of the Holocaust. The landscape may be becoming more familiar, but the jittery handheld camera is unsettling. The video weaves together the nightmare of the past and the ordinariness of the present. Like Wróblewski’s painting Fish, Bałka’s work presents an ordered symbolic space that falls apart when confronted with individual experience. It exemplifies man’s helplessness in the face of the enormity of the crime.

Now, please turn around.

Katarzyna Kozyra is an artist whose works have helped advance the field of critical art in Poland. There has been a lot of talk about how her art has shaped culture. Kozyra uses a wide range of techniques: from new media art, sculpture, photography and performance to video installations and art campaigns.

Ties of Blood is four large-format photographs depicting two sisters, one of whom is the artist herself. The women are shown against a background of religious symbols: the cross and the crescent. The red signs, which are also symbols of humanitarian campaigns, are the colour of blood. The 1995 work refers to events in the former Yugoslavia, where fratricidal religious and ethnic fighting took place in the early 1990s. The artist aimed to draw attention to the innocent victims of war. The women are depicted against a backdrop of Christian and Islamic symbols, but they are also surrounded by cauliflowers and cabbage heads, emphasising fertility on the one hand and referring to the land and agricultural fields being turned into mass graves for the fallen. In 1999, the AMS Outdoor Gallery organised a billboard campaign that resulted in Ties of Blood being displayed on the streets of Polish cities, which caused outrage. The artist was accused of insulting religious feelings, flaunting nudity and mutilated flesh. Under pressure and after protests, the work was censored.

Follow the corridor back to the passage on the right, where the Existences zone begins.

Wróblewski wanted his art to entice, inspire, and motivate people to take action. He thought that by using common imagery and concepts and by employing recognisable colour schemes and geometric shapes, he could get his point across more effectively. For this reason, Wróblewski’s work evolved towards direct realism, social realism.

He adopted this preference for realism in his own genre portrayals. Wróblewski’s painting, usually regarded as heavy and gloomy, is surprising when we look at the work he created during the Thaw. The artist studied and illustrated the everydayness of both domestic life and the world at large. This period saw him produce numerous drawings, compositions and paintings featuring his immediate family, often his wife, Teresa, and newborn son, nicknamed Kitek.

These works are reminiscent of photographs, documenting moments from everyday life. For viewers, they familiar and easy, in contrast to the paintings created in other series. At the same time, some of these images attempt to make a moral evaluation and a reckoning with the past.

Let’s move to the end of the wall.

Zbylut Grzywacz, the co-founder of the Wprost Group, who was the most radical in his artistic stance, treated painting as a space for interventionist art, in which the painter criticised the official communist propaganda. The painting Relay I from the series ‘March ’68’ is a commentary on the political crisis in Poland. It was the result of public disillusionment from the reigning in of the civil liberties granted during the Thaw. The cancellation of Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), which was being staged at the National Theatre in Warsaw, provoked student groups to revolt. After defying censorship and openly criticising the authorities, the press campaign took on an ideological and anti-Semitic character. The repression of the Civic Militia and the Security Service was mainly directed against Jews. His ‘March ’68’ series of paintings explores the ways in which communist authorities in Poland manipulated society and the ways in which individuals were caught up in the web of control. Andrzej Wróblewski’s socially involved art can clearly be seen in the social commentary of Grzywacz’s work from that period.

Continue along the left-hand wall where the Little Realism zone extends

In 1956, Wróblewski’s painting Mother and Daughter, Clothes Washing. The work is both an impressive illustration of emotionally invested realism and a moving look at life in the postwar era. An older woman is shown sitting in the corner of the room, her legs crossed, her arms folded, seemingly asleep, while a younger woman stands at the laundry line and folds clothes. The bright colours used seem to trivialise this genre scene. However, this is only a pretence. The faces of the women are hidden by the hanging coloured fabrics, which also reduces the field of view. The older woman seems to be stagnating, while the younger one is willing to risk everything by engaging in seemingly ‘normal’ daily activities. Because everyone lives the same routine behind closed doors, everyone has the potential to be a hero behind a mask.

Andrzej, known as Kitek, born in 1954, was the first-born son of Andrzej and Teresa Wróblewski. He was the subject of many of the artist’s drawings and paintings, appearing in home scenes as a baby and a teenager. These intimate and personal images of life at home are a sharp contrast to much of the artist’s other work.

The painting’s space is framed in a very basic way, using only geometric lines. The artist’s son, his back to the viewer, peers out the window, but he can’t see the horizon because the lines of laundry are in the way. The figure of the boy in Wróblewski’s painting was alluded to years later by Jarosław Modzelewski, whose work you can see on the left. It showed a boy with his back turned making a drawing on the window sill. The glass in both cases serves as a metaphor for the image’s role in revealing the truth and crystallising an understanding of the world. The window is the boundary of initiation and socialisation, of stepping out of safe surroundings into an undefined world; in Wróblewski’s case, entombed by the abstract geometry of hanging laundry, in Modzelewski’s, captured by an approaching heavy, unfriendly cloud.

Let’s look at the work alongside.

Wróblewski’s series Queues and Waiting Rooms, produced between 1955 and 1957, feature ironic depictions of mundane, everyday situations. The propaganda of the communist period, the hardship of life and closure to the world, was expressed by the artist in a specific cultural framework. The piece entitled Queue deserves special mention. The characters depicted in the drawing are similar to each other; they don’t express any emotion, nor do they interact or form social bonds. However, they are all facing the same direction – everyone expecting to complete their destiny. The doll-like appearance of the child sitting on the seat is striking as well.

The resignation, lack of faith and hope for a better life expressed by the characters depicted are a criticism of communism in the form of a painting. A similar reaction to the restrictive reality of martial law is the work by Jarosław Modzelewski – Umivajetsi, utirajetsya, odyevayetsya from 1985, which you can see on the left. The image alludes to an illustrated popular storybook for children in Russian. Images taken out of their original context show everyday, routine activities, portrayed as a distinct social code. At the same time, they become a more general reflection on the rituals that make up human existence.

Let’s go over to the opposite wall.

Wróblewski painted Woman as one of his last paintings, shortly before his death. The work was the culmination of the frequently repeated theme from ‘Queues’ and ‘Waiting Rooms’. Here we see a front-facing, flat female figure, who completely melds with the chair due to the lack of anatomical detail. A dark figure framed by a strong outline contrasts with the smooth, light background. The rejection of external props led to a melding of the figure and abstraction within a single composition. The viewer’s eyes are drawn to the horizontal, rounded shape at chest level. It expresses cut skin, a crevice, a dark abyss. Rather than exuding divinity, however, the depiction of the figure, which is reminiscent of images of saints in icons, overwhelms with an impression of emptiness and non-being.

In this and other works, the artist shows the transformation of a human being into a piece of furniture. ‘Chairification’ is a study in slow dying.

Let’s go over to the white wall on the left, where the Figures/Mutilation zone begins.

Wróblewski’s inner conflicts and resentment may have inspired a recurring theme of mutilation in his artwork.  These themes appear in works depicting both crippled figures and gymnasts.

Between 1956 and 1957, he produced Torn Person I, Man in a Wheelchair and People. The artist marked the figures with oval cracks that yawn with emptiness. Immobility, powerlessness and open unhealed wounds are evidence of an existential crisis. In a similar vein, Wróblewski’s work alludes to the drama that unfolded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the dropping of the atomic bombs. They document the psychological and external forces that combine to render an individual helpless and nameless.

The work made on paper entitled People emanates coldness and alienation. Both the models’ hands were cut off and painted with symbols to represent the mutilations. Over a sky-like backdrop, over which clouds mimicking the shapes of the scars on the body float, the motif of wounds is echoed. Despite the originally gentle message and the soft colours used, the composition has an extremely heavy and meaningful character. To emphasise the loneliness, pain, and quiet suffering of the person, the figures sitting next to each other have been painted in a purposefully geometric style. It’s a commentary on a social and ideological drama: the helplessness of people who have lost all social ties and connections as a result of the governing regime.

Let’s look at the work lying on the floor on the left behind us.

Iza Tarasewicz is an artist who manipulates matter through demolition and reconstruction, giving birth to novel forms. She uses organic materials, often of animal origin, in her work. The work shown here, Wounds, was made from pig bladders placed in a cardboard box. This is a form of depraved art that makes allusions to psychological condition and the resulting physical and emotional wounds. The artist operates in the realm of abject art – the art of disgust. Yawning emptiness, covered in dried blood, the open wounds evoke decay and destruction.

Let’s move on.

Marta Szulc was inspired to create a series of works under the common title Body Culture by a 1925 publication entitled Culture of the Female Body, which was a set of exercises for women. After looking at the idealised photographs of women assuming graceful poses, the painter created paintings with different overtones. The cult of the female body treats it as an ideal provided a number of guidelines are met. In her collage of watercolours the artist takes issue with this idealisation of the body. She treats bodies aggressively, ripping them apart, tearing holes and dismembering them. Its intention is to give voice once again to tormented corporeality. Through Szulc, the brutally treated female figures, bearing visible traces of violence draw attention to the need for respect for the female body, which continues to be distorted by the virtual and created world of mass media that surrounds us.

Let’s move on to the next section, entitled Other Landscapes.

The Tatras were Wróblewski’s favourite place for hiking and relaxing. They were also the subjects on occasion for artistic experiments. Tatra themes were an important motif in various periods of the artist’s work. As a hiker crossing hills and peering over precipices, he created crisp edges and slopes. These hurried accounts were like a reconstruction of a forced climb. Wróblewski, however, did not confine himself to merely recording specific mountain ranges. The painter also created works that were synthetic and highly simplified, geometric and rhythmic compositions reflecting on the majesty of the highest of Polish mountains.

Let’s look at the opposite wall, where the  Direct Realism zone begins.

Realism permeated all of Wroblewski’s work. It found his expression in works touching on liminal states – death, violent agitation and suffering. In Organic Portrait, Wróblewski depicts the naked materiality of human beings. The internal organs perform a disturbing anatomical act, bringing the physiology and biology of life into sharp focus. The artist had personal experience with epilepsy, so he understood the precarious nature of his health and life. Wróblewski addresses themes of physical deterioration, the relentless march of time, and the inexorable pull of death in the works on display.

Let’s take a look at the following works.

A few months before his mysterious death, Andrzej Wróblewski went to Yugoslavia. He stayed there from 30 October to 21 November 1956. During this short trip, he became interested in Balkan culture. He travelled to remote cemeteries, where the shape of the tombstones captured his imagination. The painter found tremendous motivation in the simple, even naive, geometric shapes of local tombstones. During the trip, he made accurate sketches of tombs built by local stonemasons. These primitive shapes typically featured a cross design alongside simplified human figures. Wróblewski’s later decorative monotypes and abstract gouaches, in which he explored the theme of human frailty, both emotional and physical, were inspired by tombstones. The artist painted vivid colours into the tombstones, giving life to the otherwise grotesque symbols. The works’ simple composition belies a profound depth of thought and introspection. In the artist’s memories, tombstones were a substitute for the living body, they were a kind of link with the dead – a way of communication between those who had passed away and those who mourn them.

Let’s move on to the end of the exhibition.

The painting Lovers shows contrasting figures: a woman and a man. The illuminated figure of the woman is covered with bright, irregular patches of colour in shades of red, orange and yellow. At the back, you can see a bent man shrouded in shadow holding her hand. It’s the only thing keeping her upright, it seems. His posture is unsteady, while his face is deathly. Instead of the face of a living person in love, the clear outline of a skull is visible. The dark, bluish colouring of the male figure suggests that he is not of this world. Maybe it’s just a sad account of how Wróblewski’s wife, Teresa, felt helpless as he spiralled deeper into his depression and fixation on dying. The artist said of himself: ‘[…] I carry death with me all the time, and fatigue or a change of weather is enough for me to feel it in my chest’.

Death and references to it never left Wróblewski’s work. This painting, therefore, is an epilogue of the artist’s life.

On 23 March 1957, Andrzej Wróblewski’s body was found in the vicinity of Zazadnia, near the road to Morskie Oko. The circumstances of his tragic death, which remain unexplained, began the legend of Wróblewski – the last Romantic and one of the greatest outsiders in post-war Polish culture.