Opening Hours
Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm
Gallery
Art Agenda Nova
Batorego 2, Krakow
Artist
Andrzej Wróblewski
ABOUT EXHIBITION
Works on paper prepared for the exhibition in the nova gallery come from two sketchbooks by Andrzej Wróblewski dated to 1950. The exhibition also includes several separate works, portraits drawn on calla – women with needlework, or a man in uniform and earlier, judging by the color approach to theme, watercolor depicting the view from the terrace numbered by the artist’s mother’s hand. In turn, a later work that has no connection with the sketchbooks is a pencil portrait of the artist’s wife dated to 1954.
We realize that this is an exhibition presenting a fragment of the artist’s work, his everyday, ordinary activity. The aim of this exhibition is to show Wróblewski’s found works to a wider audience, show how much the artist’s sketchbook talks about his interests, observations, the usual need to mark what he is attacking from outside. These seemingly insignificant, unfinished notes of events set the path to greater realizations, and although they were not intended for exhibition as separate works – artistic quality, formal advantages, many of them do not differ from works considered to be finished. They also allow you to get to know the artist’s method of work. Drawing studies, subsequent sketches, notes are an excellent introduction to this work, which testifies to the precision, persistence and striving for perfection of the author. Also the opportunity to show a few well-thought-out gouaches, mainly landscapes, determined the desire to do this exhibition.
We would like to draw your attention to the date of the work, 1950. Andrzej Wróblewski was 23 at the time, he was still before the diploma, he became an assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. So these are student works, some with a very academic character. There are no examples of strictly avant-garde works, Wróblewski’s period of abstraction was already behind him. However, their presentation in no way affects the artist’s position.
Among the repetitive themes, we can see the interior of the artist’s flat in Salwator with a characteristic armchair present in many of his paintings, portraits of relatives, but also scenes from the studio or open air painting. A trace of Wróblewski’s activities in the ZMP and the record of participation in the tasks related to the collectivization of the village are further sketches depicting rural gatherings. Studies of peasant faces – women’s and men’s, portrait of a village mayor sitting on a chair with a crumpled hat in his hands, find continuation in later oil paintings. Appearances appear, sketches of characters for larger painting compositions – three men with the National Front inscription or figures with a banner could be the beginning of a painting fresco, which is the image of “Youth Rally in West Berlin” (1951), and a woman with a fist clenched in the painting “Episode from the Korean War “(1951).
Situational sketches, dialogues, notes on the compulsion of giving grain to the state with the exact addresses of people living in the villages of Samocice, Zalipie and Świebodzin near Kraków, also found a place in sketchbooks.
(“Employs mercenaries as for sanation and does not sell grain for democracy”)
The most impressive compositions include gouache depicting the rest of the couple in the outdoors, peculiar panneaux, included in postaci lying on the ground, in the rays of the sun, a figure of a woman and a man.
Among the works presented at the exhibition, we will also see a very well-known motif – repeatedly painted, lavished ink, views of mountains, Tatra landscapes.
Wróblewski spoke about the drawing in the texts which we quote in the catalog. They show that the artist approached these works in a significant way, he wanted to avoid “his own aesthetics” and give adequate associations to the fleeting associations, which allows us to present them without fear that naturalistic studies may seem less important to his work. The display of twenty of the 1500 works of legacy that the artist left behind is a complement, documentation, because these works have not been shown before, existed as heavily strained by time, requiring conservation efforts and, unfortunately, incomplete, yellowed notebooks.
Project prepared with the financial participation of the City of Krakow.