The Warsaw gallery “Zachęta” is showing the exhibition “Jerzy Krawczyk. A game for everything”. This is the first in thirty-five years such extensive presentation of the works of one of the most enigmatic and original Polish painters of the 20th century. The show is organized in cooperation with the Museum of Art in Łódź. Its aim is to restore Krawczyk’s art to the present public and show his fascinating painting in a new light.

The display presents the multifaceted work based on the painter’s experiences, his personal convictions and references to the canon of early and early 20th-century art. The exhibition includes the artist’s mature works, including Łódź landscapes painted from the second half of the 1950s, still-life works and portraits developing the concept of spatial realism, works from the Department of Correct Anatomy of the Medical University of Lodz, as well as works devoted to the war and the Holocaust, created until the premature death of the artist in 1969.

“Jerzy Krawczyk was a complicated and mysterious personality. So far, many biographical puzzles have not been solved. Various aspects of his education and interests are intriguing (…) Life provided an excess of nourishment for his unique imagination. There are many unsolvable contexts there, also because the artist himself earned his legend and liked to set traps”, writes Anna Baranowa in the accompanying Polish-English publication “Jerzy Krawczyk. A game for everything.

“Jerzy Krawczyk’s first exhibition at Zachęta took place half a century ago, two years after his tragic death; the second falls around the artist’s 100th birthday. I hope that the present exhibition will be an opportunity to take his painting out of the drawer it has been packed into for a long time and look at it in a more complex and universal context”, writes Baranowa.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński