From 20th of April to 24th of November, in the Procuratie Vecchie building on St. Mark’s Square in Venice, the exhibition “In the First Person” by Andrzej Wróblewski can be seen. It is one of the accompanying exhibitions of this year’s Biennale, with Biennale curator Adriano Pedrosa as the inviting party. The exhibition features over sixty works on display come from the collection of Anna and Jerzy Starak, with the Starak Family Foundation, headed by Elżbieta Dzikowska, acting as the main organizer on the Polish side. The exhibition is curated by Anna Muszyńska.
The tragically deceased thirty-year-old in 1957 is a key figure in Polish art in the early years after World War II. The strength and simplicity of his very distinctive painting, somewhere halfway between reportage frames and colouristic abstraction, will be noticed in Venice as an important moment in the history of European art. Art struggling to cope with the excess of war images will be placed in context by Wróblewski’s work. Wróblewski will become a figure placing the still rather indistinct outline of war trauma in the biographies of Eastern Europeans. Wróblewski’s paintings will withstand confrontation with the canvases of Francis Bacon. They are equally simple, direct, memorable, and at the same time sufficiently enigmatic.
And entirely different, just like our piece of the continent compared to English dilemmas.
Wróblewski’s painting keeps pace with existentialism (if not ahead of it) in its subcultural trend of the 1940s and 1950s. And, like French café existentialism, it has moments of clear enchantment with the naive simplicity of the progressive-Marxist fairy tale of the new post-war order. This is a serious asset for the ambitious art market.
It is not so much Wróblewski’s biography, but the biography combined with what can be seen in his paintings, that provides ample material for a grand, widescreen film story. And maybe it is worth trying to make such an attempt.
