Paweł Wróbel
His paintings are very popular among French collectors. I don’t own all of Paweł Wróbel’s paintings of devils, but I do own a lot, around ten. He came to my exhibition in Chorzów once, but I didn’t get to know him very well.
A miner and a Silesian primitivist painter, Paweł Wróbel was born in 1913 in Szopienice (now a part of Katowice) and died in 1984. He completed only three grades of elementary school and started to earn his own living at the age of nine – first, he would make some extra money selling his ink on paper drawings of scenes from famous Western films, then he worked in a coal mine. He fought in the September Campaign; after being injured near Przemyśl, he was held captive by the Nazis. He eventually fled home. In 1944, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He fled across the frontline to the Soviet army, was taken captive again and sent to Kamchatka. In 1947, he returned to Silesia, where he worked in the Wieczorek coal mine. There he met Teofil Ociepka, Ewald Gawlik, and Erwin Sówka – members of the Janowska Group, that is, the Unprofessional Artists Association (Koło Malarzy Nieprofesionalnych), which he then joined.
Sonia Wilk, the curator of the Silesian Museum in Katowice, wrote:
He attached a lot of importance in his works to the arrangement of spatial planes. He would start his composition with painting the sky, after which he would fill the surface with ranges of slag heaps, chimneys, and hoisting towers. Underneath he would place colourful roofs, and then facades of buildings with clearly detailed windows, with fluttering curtains and flowerpots. Such landscapes sometimes constituted an anonymous background, but it was just as frequently the case that the painter included elements characteristic of Szopienice or Nikiszowiec, such as the railway bridge over today’s Lwowska Street, or the facade of Saint Anna’s Church.
Wróbel would depict the daily life of the city: mine shafts towering over the landscape, neighbourhoods of familoki [multifamily houses built at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries for industrial workers and their families, trans.], fairs, gardens, pigsties, people strolling, and robust Silesian women. Few people know that he would also portray his own imaginative ideas of evil spirits. In 2017, the exhibition Kroniki Przedmieść: Malarstwo Pawła Wróbla (Suburban Chronicles: The Paintings of Paweł Wróbel) took place in the Silesian Museum. However, those who wish to explore Wróbel’s devilish works ought to visit Warsaw’s Przedpiekle.
Pensive Christ (sitting on a devil)