The National Museum in Wrocław is honouring the 80-year-old artist with a presentation of his work, from his early metaphorical compositions the period from the mid-1950s, later the series "Aggression" and "Invasion" to geometric pieces to spatial compositions informed by Conceptual Art.
This is the first retrospective of Zdzisław Jurkiewicz - a painter, draughtsman, photographer, theorist and author of programmatic manifestos, a member of the Wrocław Group, who has emerged as one of most significant figures on the contemporary art scene in Wrocław. We begin with his early metaphorical compositions, says the director of the museum, Mariusz Hermansdorfer.
Always avant-garde and inquisitive, the artist has invented and inspired others rather than followed mainstream trends. As noted by the curator of the exhibition Magdalena Szafkowska, Jurkiewicz cannot be identified with one style:
A total artist, who makes his own borders and goes beyond them, an artist with unlimited passions, without boundaries, from mathematics, cosmology, jazz music, poetry to cultivating exotic plants and breeding small animals.
The show traces the Wrocław-based artist's expansive career, including his earlier jazz-inspired paintings, he became fascinated with jazz music while in high school, under the influence of his colleague, jazz musician - Krzysztof Komeda-Trzciński. After graduation, he created monochrome paintings, much more abstract and structuralised compositions, inspired by "microscope biological forms" as seen through a microscope. In 1961 he began the series "In Action", continued through 1967 with the series "Aggression", "Invasions" and "Zones". They took on the form of action painting.
Later experimenting with lighting, he used it to alter the shape of the his pieces: building solid subjects, and placing blue and red lights between and inside them. At the end of the 70s becoming unfulfilled with simply painting, he expanded the range of his materials and returned to another one of his passions - he constructed pyramids, which became mazes for dancing Japanese mice or a house for hamsters, where they entered by paper, twisted tubes "a chimney".
Zdzisław Jurkiewicz gave up painting for some time and produced two photographic works in 1970. His "Incident" consisted of a series of photographs of the model of a plane, hanging in the window on a nylon string. When the camera was positioned correctly, the sun reflected in the window-pane suggested that the "plane" exploded, while other pictures of the same model revealed that this image was just a trick, a "fraud". The second of those works by Jurkiewicz, called "On the Wall, Canvas and Easel" is a series of photographs in which a large rectangular frame appears within the space of the author's workshop. It seems to actually exist there as an object, but the author - who moves within the field of the camera's vision - reveals the trick, performed by placing a small black frame in front of the camera lens.
The exhibition features paintings, drawings and photographs by the artist. The exhibition is organised primarily from the collection of the National Museum in Wrocław, the artist's private collection and from the National Museums in Warsaw, Pozńan and Szczecin, CSW Gallery Ujazdowski Castle, the Museum of Art in Łódż, and the "Gallery 72" Chełmski Museum in Chełm.
The accompanying catalogue presents a comprehensive picture of the artist's artistic and theoretic activity.
Curator: Magdalena Szafkowska.
The exhibition is open from the 27th of June and runs through the 25th of September 2011.
National Museum in Wroclaw
pl. Powstańców Warszawy 5, 50-153 Wrocław
Director: Mariusz Hermansdorfer
tel. (+48 71) 372 51 50,372 51 51, 372 51 53, 372 51 56
fax (+48 71) 343 56 43
www.mnwr.art.pl
Source: Press release