EDWARD DWURNIK: PRIDE AND SHAME

I paint people mostly out of pity—for their imperfection, and mine. Because it’s a pity that adult lives are basically a never-ending attempt to overcome our physical limitations, a struggle with laziness, with one’s own shortcomings. … My dream is that the paintings I make end up someday in the homes of my models and become part of their everyday life.

Edward Dwurnik Pride and Shame concentrates on Dwurnik’s output from the 1970s and ’80s, presenting two major series of his: Sportspeople and Workers. The curatorial intent was to reconstruct the artist’s attitude that he developed at the turn of the 1960s and ’70s—opposing the elitism of art, sympathizing with artistic outsiders, conceiving of painterly activity as a document of social life above all. Dwurnik believed in realism in the arts, in their engagement with life at its most ordinary; he considered this egalitarian in that it helped him communicate with the people he portrayed. In other words, Edward Dwurnik believed that the medium of painting could help express as well as foster communality. The exhibition takes up something central to Polish identity over the past half-century—that is, the experience of social mobility and remodeled class society.