Jerzy Duda-Gracz

Jerzy Duda-Gracz, properly Jerzy Dzierżysław Duda vel Gracz (1941, Częstochowa - 2004, Łagów), was a painter, draughtsman, stage designer and teacher - one of the most recognisable Polish artists of the 20th century. In 1962 he began his studies at the Faculty of Graphic Art of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (Katowice branch), which he completed in 1968. His collaboration with the weeklies „Szpilki” and „Literatura” brought him early popularity; in time he became a lecturer and finally a professor of the University of Silesia in Katowice.

He practised art in a broadly understood realist convention, with a dominant deformation of figures and grotesque. He created a world of an exposing character, using the language of journalism and allegory, and his canvases balanced between satire and sentimentalism and nostalgia. The figures in his paintings have not only a deformed physiognomy but also pronounced vices - gluttony, alcoholism, laziness. Illustrating the everyday life of Poles, he first laid bare the absurdities of the People's Republic, and later provoked historiosophical and metaphysical discussions. For this penetrating, uncompromising image of reality he earned the title of a master of irony and grotesque.

He most often joined his paintings into cycles - „Polish Motifs and Portraits”, „Polish Motifs, Dances, Dialogues”, „Jura Paintings”, „Aristocratic-Historical Paintings”, „Polish Landscapes” - and among his most famous single works are „In Memory of My Father” (1970), „The Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or the Foreigner's Job” (1977) and „Polish Calendar” (1981). In his late years his two monumental realisations came into being: the „Jasna Góra Golgotha” (2000-2001) - a Stations of the Cross cycle in the Chapel of Our Lady at Jasna Góra - and „To Chopin”, his largest and last cycle, a painterly interpretation of almost all the works of Fryderyk Chopin (over 300 paintings). Working on it, in search of nature uncontaminated by the present, he traversed the whole of Poland; he died suddenly during a plein-air in Łagów, without finishing this work of his life.

Duda-Gracz had over 180 solo exhibitions in Poland and abroad - including in Berlin, London, Paris, Moscow, Rome, Vienna, Chicago and New York - and took part in nearly 350 group presentations. He represented Poland at the 41st Venice Art Biennale (1984), at the Cologne Art Fair (1986, 1987) and at EXPO '92 in Seville. A permanent display of his works is held in the Upper Silesian Museum in Bytom and the Nowa Huta Cultural Centre in Kraków. His name - and his impossible-to-counterfeit style - remain synonymous with a distinct, penetrating voice in Polish figurative painting.