EXHIBITIONS
2019/12/04
SUBSTANTIAL REALISM
19th December 2019 - 12th April 2020
The exhibition presents two great personalities of Polish art, who significantly revealed their own individuality and universality in the turbulent period just after the World War II, creating simultaneously in 1950s in Kraków.
Maria Jarema and Andrzej Wróblewski represent modern post-War painting, under the banner of “Substantial Realism”, about which Mieczysław Porębski and Tadeusz Kantor were the first to write in the key manifesto titled “Pro domo sua” in 1946. The realism that opposes the shallow and meaningless mimesis and becomes a pretext for expressing the heart of the matter. The realism whose formula can successfully carry abstract and ambiguous contents, and finally whose new form does not neglect the achievements of the avant-garde.
The topic of subjectivation of form is essential in the practice of both artists. Wróblewski deforms and converts figurative motifs to strengthen the message, while Jarema gives clearly anatomical shapes to her abstractions. At the same time, her subtle mono- types saturated with meanings perfectly coincide formally with his strong, expressive and yet sensitive painted records of memory and reality.
The exhibition of Maria Jarema and Andrzej Wróblewski is a story about art in the era of slavery, leashes and snares of orders, a dialogue about the price and consequences of choices, but also about the final win. They are united not only by the state of limbo between abstraction and figuration, the need to build a separate language, the courage, uncompromisingness and consistent rejection of the hitherto paradigms, but also and foremost the strive for unrestrained artistic freedom.
Ania Muszyńska, curator
Art is born of the freedom of thought and it can be said that genius is the maximum freedom of thinking in relation to the world as this freedom is already limited and defined by life itself, by the past and the present, and one needs the strength of the genius to get rid of its bonds.
Maria Jarema
In my practice, I need to preserve - and first seize - a royal generality, and all encompassing cognoscibility; in it, I need to encompass everything, that which I have experienced, and a great deal of that which I only know (form books, stories), and, finally, even more of that which I don’t know, but which has to be inside of me, because I’m a son, a Pole, an intellectual, a frequent friend, a passerby, a consoler.
Andrzej Wróblewski
The exhibition presents works by Maria Jarema nad Andrzej Wróblewski from the collection of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor – Cricoteka, collection of Teresa and Andrzej Starmach and Anna and Jerzy Starak’s collection. Exhibition open at Spectra Art Space at Bobrowiecka Str. 6 in Warsaw, from 19th December 2019 till 12th April 2020 every day from 11 a.m. and 6 p.m.
Guided tour (in Polish) on each first Saturday of a month at 11 a.m.
Guided tour (in Polish) on each first Saturday of a month at 11 a.m.
Free admission.
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