Museo Reina Sofaa Opens RECTO / VERSO Exhibit Today

Today, November 17, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía inaugurates the exhibition Andrzej Wróblewski: Recto / Verso, focused on Andrzej Wróblewski (1927-1957), one of the most important Polish artists of the 20th century. This will be the largest Wróblewski retrospective outside of Poland.

Wróblewski was a creator of formal experiments on the border of abstraction and figuration, an artist manifesting an unusually suggestive vision of war and human degradation, based on deep political commitments. His rich, diverse body of work was created over a very brief period (less than ten years), during a distinctly turbulent era.

The exhibition Andrzej Wróblewski: Recto / Verso concentrates on two phases in his work: its very beginning, when the artist was trying to come up with his own painterly language (1948-1949) and its very end when, after a period of faith in Stalinist socialist realism and voluntary submission to its mandatory guidelines, he attempted to redefine himself, as if starting from scratch again (1956-1957). These two phases are connected in Wróblewski's art, both in subject and form, by a unique and highly personalized approach to modernity and the avant-garde. His numerous double-sided paintings and works on paper created in these periods are the material sign of his being torn between political engagement and artistic experiment.

The narrative of the exhibition is based on Wróblewski's double-sided works, which are usually exhibited one side at a time, with that choice of side decided upon by the paintings' owners and curators. The artist's use of both sides of these canvases or the paper works was not an accident or coincidence, or purely the result of an economic situation. Double-sidedness was a sort of program for Wróblewski and a fitting symbol for all his work: he made the two sides complete one another and question and complicate the other. This type of dual coexistence, of what are most often extremely different statements both formally and content-wise, is also a pointed way of addressing viewers, who have to literally take sides, while at the same time accepting the existence of both images as two complex problems and two solutions. It is also an expression of the conviction that an artist is an active participant in reality, with the goal of his or her art being the proposal of temporary solutions. The exhibition's additional selection of works on paper and single-sided canvases show the same key motifs being expanded and enriched by Wróblewski at a given juncture in his work. The multilayered divisions, so materially present in Andrzej Wróblewski's art, embody the philosophical questions and artistic answers that arose after the Second World War; while his lack of compromise in facing irreconcilable contradictions and ideological demands makes his work particularly relevant in our contemporary situation.

Andrzej Wróblewski: Recto / Verso, has been curated by Éric de Chassey, professor of the History of modern art at the École normale supérieure in Lyon and Marta Dziewanska, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Catalogue

The exhibition is also accompanied by Andrzej Wróblewski. Recto / Verso - a publication edited by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia including essays by Éric de Chassey, Marta Dziewa?ska, Rachel Haidu, Tom McDonough, Ulrich Loock and artist's writings.