Time Races Ahead, Poland Modernises

Just over a year ago, the jury of Animalis 2020 —a triennial competition for animal-themed painting organised for more than a dozen years by the MM Municipal Art Gallery in Chorzów—was almost unanimous in wishing to award the prize to a painting in shades of grey and black made by Michał Cygan in 2019. After reading the title, ‘The Place Where Dogs Die’, some jurors decided that the picture was too drastic and too literary. Painters were strongly represented on the jury, and with Silesian reliability they preferred different varieties of realism to imagined fantasy. Of course, someone may abandon a dog in a forest, but such an accumulation of cruelty in one place and one frame seemed a gross exaggeration at the time. It did not fit inside the ‘jury’s head’, and the painting did not win. 

Time races ahead, and Poland is modernising at breakneck speed, just as promised—in a great many areas at once, including the colouristically sombre depths of the forest.