[POLISH 'NEUE WILDE' - UNOFFICIAL ART] Original poster design for an exhibition of works by Wies?aw Obrzydowski at the Galeria BWA in Sopot, 1987

Szumski, Zbigniew and Wies?aw Obrzydowski

About this Item

Original cardboard maquette measuring 50 × 70 cm with paper appliques. Mixed media including crayon, pencil, watercolor to paper and cardboard. Signed by Zbigniew Szumski and dated 1986. Very good. A unique poster design for the exhibition of the Polish Neue Wilde (or neo-expressionist) artist Wies?aw Obrzydowski (1938-2017), held at the Galeria BWA in Sopot in 1987. Designed by the painter, graphic artist, set designer, and theater director Zbigniew Szumski (born 1956), this one-of-a-kind object appears to be a collaboration between the two artists, with one of the collaged drawings possibly done by Obrzydowski himself. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Art in Krakow in 1966, Obrzydowski came out of the Kraków school of colorists, eventually rejecting their aesthetization and destroying all work from the period before 1969 and moving on to a more expressionist mode of painting. Anti-capitalist and anti-aestheticist, he is known for a kind of "sloppiness" of his images, with portraits, as well as erotic images and landscapes as common themes. He is also known for painting on both sides of the cardboard, paper, or canvas, making it difficult to preserve and present his work. This unique maquette object features a collage of erotic imagery and portraiture typical of his work, with layered technique and markings visible under the collaged leaves. The poster was prepared for the January 1987 exhibition of Obrzydowski's work in Sopot called "Po raz pierwszy nad morzem" (First time by the sea). Obrzydowski's work in the Sopot exhibition went on to the seminal exhibition of Polish expressionist art at the National Museum in Warsaw in 1987-1988, "Realizm radykalny, abstrakcja konkretna: sztuka drugiej po?owy lat osiemdziesi?tych" (Radical Realism, Concrete Abstraction: Art of the Second Half of the 1980s). The Warsaw exhibition would be a breakout event for Obrzydowski, who did not fit neatly into any of the existing art movements in the 1970s and 1980s in Poland and worked largely on the margins (See Stefania Krzysztofowicz-Kozakowska, "Modern Polish Painting: Polish painting after the year 1945", p. 9). The designer, Zbigniew Szumski, is a Sopot native, and a graduate of the State Higher School of Fine arts in Gda?sk (1983). He would move away from painting and into performing arts, co-founding the interdisciplinary group "Teatr Cinema" in 1992 which works at the intersection of dance, theater and the visual arts. He continues to design posters for "Teatr Cinema" in addition to directing the productions.

Seller Inventory # 54444

Bibliographic Details

• Title: [POLISH 'NEUE WILDE' - UNOFFICIAL ART] Original poster design for an exhibition of works by Wies?aw Obrzydowski at the Galeria BWA in Sopot, 1987
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Avant-Garde
  • Contemporary Art
  • Poland