Edward Dwurnik graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1970.

Dwurnik's History of Poland
A Review of Edward Dwurnik's work.

 
Bold, controversial, energetic - both in his art and in the course of his brilliant career - Edward Dwurnik is quite simply one of the most important painters working in Poland today. His academic training began in the late 1960s, a period of great turmoil for the countries behind the Iron Curtain. The decades that followed were equally momentous: food shortages, economic crises, the rise and brutal suppression of the Solidarity movement, the imposition of martial law, sudden independence from Soviet control, the development of political and economic independence and, most recently, acceptance into the European Community. Dwurnik's paintings chronicle what it has meant to be Polish during this period. He paints Polish society not from the idealized perspective of the politicians and poets, but from that of the common, everyday Pole. It seems fitting that, in spite of his fine academic training (or perhaps because of it), Dwurnik chose as his painterly language the primitive manner of the illiterate and self-trained Polish folk artist "Nikifor," whose street works sold for bread and shelter recorded the Poland of the generation before. His is the language of the working class; of comic book heroes and trash novels. It would be odd, after all, to record the "real" world in grandiose style. Admirers praise Dwurnik for his keen sense of observation and for his nearly journalistic style of painting. Critics condemn him, in part, for his abandonment of academic rigor. It is not Dwurnik's role to show us pretty things in the style of the romantics. Instead, he shows us the world as he sees it. He sees it better than most; he feels its essence. Dwurnik often takes liberties with physical "reality" to convey something much more real. The intangible transcends the tangible, and therein lies the power of Dwurnik's reporting. To understand what it is to be Polish, one must strive to understand Dwurnik - and vice versa. The Nevin Kelly Gallery is pleased to welcome this true Polish master to Washington.

Edward Dwurnik graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1970. His works hang in the Presidential Palace in Warsaw, the Polish National Museum and other European museums. He is the winner of the 1992 Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Prize for painting and a 1983 Solidarity Cultural Award.

Shalom Galicja (2002)	60 x 83 in. oil on canvas

Warsaw, Castle Square (2002)	SOLD