Self-Portrait, Portrait

English below

When we think of the work of Edward Dwurnik, one of the most outstanding and prolific Polish artists of recent decades, cityscapes seen from above, colourful portraits of inhabitants of People’s Poland, dark scenes from the time of martial law, and rows of red and yellow tulips come to mind. However, when we take a closer look at the artist’s oeuvre, it turns out that the human face appears in the vast majority of his works. Shown in many different ways, more or less detailed, it always remains legible and significant. This applies both to paintings on canvas and to works on paper. It was the human being and the diversity of human emotions that interested the artist most, and through his work he “wanted to erect a monument” to ordinary people. This interest is also shared by Apolonia Dwurnik, Edward’s student and, privately, his daughter. It is precisely this shared interest that the exhibition of works by Apolonia and Edward Dwurnik at Rzeczna Art Gallery in Rybnik tells about.

The starting point for the Rybnik presentation is a series of early self-portraits by Edward Dwurnik, executed in pencil on small sheets of paper in 1966.

Twenty-three-year-old Dwurnik observes himself in the mirror and, with short, impatient pencil strokes, reproduces on paper his features, his hairstyle, the shirt he is wearing and the drawing hand. These intimate self-portraits show a student at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts who is learning his craft. A painted self-portrait created at the same time, rendered in dark greens, serves as a kind of summary of the pencil sketches. The painting was made with palpable effort, in many layers and thick paint, without the lightness and ease that would appear in his later works.

Portrait and facial study have belonged to the basic repertoire of drawing and painting education since the beginning.

It is no wonder, then, that in his early youth self-portrait and portrait occupy an important place in the artist’s oeuvre. Dwurnik wastes no time and draws all the time. When he is alone, he draws himself, and when he is among people, he draws them. He sketches scenes at the university and in a café, students during outdoor sessions, and his mother in the kitchen. A graceful example of these outdoor portraits is the series of drawings from 1967 titled “Ewa i Przemyk”. The likenesses of Ewa and Przemysław, with whom Edward Dwurnik studied and became friends, are both tender and precise. Young Academy students, caught almost in passing during an easy conversation, become for Dwurnik a pretext for seeking the visual language through which he will be able to tell stories about people.

Many such visual stories followed. The exhibition presents drawings from three cycles from the 1970s: “Moi bohaterowie” (My Heroes), “Spojrzenia” (Glances) and “Frustracje” (Frustrations). The people portrayed in them are shown in a more schematic and expressive way. The artist draws on the experience he has gained and, based on earlier observations of the model, creates imagined human types. He also introduces colour into the compositions, making the whole more dynamic. Men and women differ not only in their features and hairstyles but also in the emotions they experience. Frustration, already suggested by the title of one of the series, is present, while anger, jealousy, antipathy, amusement, surprise and curiosity are also discreetly marked, among others. The set of drawings becomes a kind of puzzle in which we can assign various emotions to the successive figures and independently guess what the artist is telling us.

Dwurnik was interested in the condition of society as revealed in individual stories.

Therefore he wove the histories and portraits of specific people into larger thematic cycles and more complex painted compositions. At the exhibition, this practice is signalled by the painting “Jerzyk i Elza” from 1991, belonging to the cycle “Sportowcy” (Athletes). It is a simple genre scene: an acquaintance of the painter, a certain Jerzyk, is portrayed at work; he is filling soda siphons with gas. Beside him stands a woman in a red dress with a little girl, with whom she has presumably just returned from school.

In the artist’s oeuvre, prominent…