Edward Dwurnik

Edward Dwurnik (1943, Radzymin - 2018, Warsaw) was a painter, draughtsman and graphic artist - one of the most recognisable contemporary Polish artists. In 1963-1970 he studied painting, graphic art and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he defended his diploma in the studio of Professor Eugeniusz Eibisch.

The turning point proved to be the exhibition of the self-taught Nikifor Krynicki, which he saw in Kielce in 1965. Dwurnik took over from him anti-aestheticism, simplified realism, an emphasis on colour and the high narrativity of the picture; from the „Drawing No. 1” he made at the time he dated the beginning of his mature work, and he called Nikifor his „most important master”. Already in 1966 he began his most famous and longest-continued cycle „Hitchhiking Travels” - bird's-eye-view landscapes of cities and towns, dense with small motifs and figures, painted throughout his life. His favourite subject was Warsaw: „I am a Varsovian... I keep painting Warsaw and I simply love it”, he confessed.

He was an extraordinarily prolific artist; his painterly oeuvre on canvas alone numbers over 8,000 works. He most often organised his work into elaborate cycles. In „Sportsmen” (1972-1992) he created a both caricatural and brutal catalogue of types of Poles of the People's Republic era, and in „Workers” (1975-1991) - a portrait of a Poland fighting the communist authorities, culminating in the period of „Solidarity”. These series earned him the title of „a painter of the everyday life of the People's Republic”. In his pictures realism in the depiction of the world interweaves with symbolism and a bitter sense of humour: the artist comments on reality, and sometimes criticises and mocks it. In the 1980s Dwurnik's painting took on an expressive and dramatic character (the cycles „The Road to the East”, „From December to June”), and after 2000 he experimented with action painting and abstraction.

Dwurnik had about a hundred solo exhibitions in Poland and abroad and took part in numerous international presentations - including documenta 7 in Kassel (1982), the Biennales in Sydney (1985) and São Paulo (1987) and the Art Olympiad in Seoul (1988). He was a laureate of the C.K. Norwid Art Criticism Award (1981) and the award of the Coutts & Co Foundation in Zurich (1992); his works are in numerous museum and private collections, and the care of his legacy is exercised by the Edward Dwurnik Foundation. Impossible to confuse with anyone else, Dwurnik remains the author of one of the most extensive visual tales of Poland, its history and its people.