Before Zbigniew Dłubak became a conceptualist, he presented his Magellan Heart (Serce Magellana) series at the 1st Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Kraków (1948). This series of macrophotographs referencing the poem by Pablo Neruda shows unidentifiable organic shapes.
Zbigniew Dłubak became properly involved in photography while he was working in the anti-fascist underground and was interned in Mauthausen concentration camp, where he had been transported to directly from the battlefields of the Warsaw Uprising. Dłubak’s artistic debut took place in the camp’s barracks, of all places, and that is also where he made his first artist friends.
As he was returning from custody, Zbigniew Dłubak (1921-2005) stopped over in Prague, where he encountered contemporary art and Czech surrealism. Inspired by this stay, he became engaged in various art initiatives upon his return to Warsaw, but most of all, he was busy with his own experiments in photography and, increasingly, painting.
I was already drawn to surrealism before the war – perhaps it was the effect of reading Witkacy , but, despite a certain formal affinity, my photographs were mostly intended as a reflection on the possibilities of looking at the world through an optical apparatus, looking at the real world, so they dealt with the issue of visual perception.
– the artist said in an interview with Jan Bury
The surrealist forms surfacing in the early period of Dłubak’s creative activity were, then, an announcement of the future analytical inclinations that eventually became his trademark and distanced him from fantastic visions and poetic innuendos. Nevertheless, before Dłubak became a conceptualist, he presented his series The Magellan Heart (Serce Magellana) at the 1st Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Kraków (1948). The series of macrophotographs references the poem by Pablo Neruda and shows unidentifiable organic shapes that at times resemble a wood thicket, at others, some bizarre objects, or yet some other ambiguous clumps. Excerpts from the poem used as the titles deepen the elusiveness of the photographed objects: I Suddenly Awake in the Night Thinking of the Far South, I Recall the Solitude of the Strait, The Discoverers Appear and of Them Nothing Remains, or the most famous one, although not directly connected to the poem, Agony of Hunger Haunts at Night. These captions, which today sound somewhat pretentious, were added by the artist very consciously. 1948 was also the year in which Dłubak wrote some of his first theoretical texts. The couple of essays From the Musings on Photography (Z rozmyślań o fotografice) touch on the crucial problem of the image-text relationship:
The opinion that an image should operate without any captions, i.e. that an elaborate title is redundant – is indefensible […] A title must reach deep in the visual content of an image, it has to expose the photographic metaphor […] The title needs to be a precise description of the artistic content of an image, which is very often complex and semantically nuanced – in a way that cannot be expressed directly through form. In such cases, one ought not to be afraid to introduce a poetic metaphor.
Embeded gallery style
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In his photographic visions, Dłubak transformed the banal views that we were used to and created a new realm which, on one hand was touchingly different, and on the other – illustrated the logic of space. Even though he didn’t recall the times of war in his art, this series from the Kraków Exhibition displays a distant echo of the experience of the camp and war. As he said in an interview:
To me, Surrealism is more like a war and post-war situation rather than an art current. The camp, guerilla struggles… It all contributed to a Surrealist atmosphere. We had a feeling that by reaching for Surrealist methods, we would be able to reflect the psychic layers that, once reached, are able to explain the essence of what happened during the war and right after.
Dłubak’s post-war experiments with the form were brutally interrupted by the communist authorities, which at the end of ‘40s were increasingly keen on evaluating artists’ engagement in socialist realism. For Dłubak, who was ideologically inclined towards communism from his early youth, it was a time of trial. He was not able to return to his photographic investigations until after Stalin’s death in 1953 and the following political thaw. Illustrating poems was, however, never again an option for Dłubak.
Zbigniew Dłubak
Agony of Hunger Haunts at Night / Nocami straszy męka głodu
From the series The Magellan Heart / Serce Magellana, 1948
Author: Adam Mazur, October 2014, transl. A. Micińska January 2015