Edward Dwur­nik (1943–2018) foun­ded an excep­tional one-​man pain­ting firm, which over half a cen­tury suc­cess­fully embodied the infor­mal credo: every society has its art. This distin­guished artist left behind a vast, fascinating and only par­tially explored oeuvre.

Gathering in the Square at Raster is the first official exhibition of Dwur­nik since his death, and opens a new chap­ter in the reading of his work. Our aim is to reveal the pain­ter as an artist with an excep­tional social ear and intuition, wor­king in a state of con­tinual mobilization, towards art as well as its broad cul­tural and political con­text. An artist/trickster who didn’t shun the ver­nacular or provocation, con­sciously manoeuvring between sym­bolism and the grotesque, the banal and the lofty, creating pain­tings that uncan­nily suit the cur­rent atmosphere of political suf­focation, polarization and populism.

The exhibition features selec­ted pain­tings from the 1980s from two famed pain­ting series by Dwur­nik, Spor­t­smen and Wor­kers. This was a special decade in the artist’s work. In 1982 he took part in the most impor­tant inter­national review of con­tem­porary art, Documenta in Kassel. But it was also a time of mar­tial law, crisis, and social ten­sion in Poland. Dwurnik’s visionary and empathetic pain­ting car­ries a unique charge of expres­sion. The pain­ter does not avert his gaze—to the con­trary, with his pain­tings he bores into questions of the con­dition of the Polish masses, their break­downs, obses­sions and fan­tasies. Here we also recognize various con­stituents: people don­ning smiling masks and soaring on wings—like the post­man solitarily traver­sing the grey Polish abyss. Pic­tures heavy with paint and muddy tones, pain­ted with verve and pas­sion, are thril­ling on both nar­rative and material levels.

During his life Dwur­nik par­ticipated in several Raster exhibitions and projects, for exam­ple presen­tingt the individual exhibition Until the End, 1973 (2003), and most recen­tly took part in the groupe exhibition If I Were the Moon (2018).