Wroclaw School of Printmaking Exhibition in Sweden
Time: 14.01 - 5.02.2017Place: EDSVIK KONSTHALL, Sollentuna
Inauguration: 14.01.2017, lead by Doctor Honoris Causa of the E.Geppert Academy of Art & Design - Mikael Kihlman.
The Wrocław School of Printmaking has been developed by three generations of artists connected
with the Artistic Printmaking Department of the Faculty of Graphic Arts and Media Art at the
Wrocław Academy of Fine Arts - teachers and to a large extent also former graduates. This very fact
makes it a diversified phenomenon, continually undergoing transformations. There are, however,
numerous consolidating factors as well. The most important ones undoubtedly include the influence of
the educational process effective at the Wrocław Academy of Fine Arts (previously, the State Higher
School of Visual Arts) as well as the artistic community's tradition manifested in the Wrocław
printmaking artists' inclination to use specific stylistics and methodology of creating the imagined
world which, as it turns out, attracts artists who think similarly; and last but not least, paradoxically,
the unwavering energy constantly motivating the younger generations to go beyond the established
status quo.
Students of the Wrocław school of art are educated in two fields: artistic printmaking and graphic
design. In the Wrocław community, the link between the two fields of printmaking is the way of
thinking of the presentation expressed in a formula which - to put it in a very simplified manner -
might be called an "image - narrative" formula. This formula was used in poster designing by the
graduates of the Wrocław school who have made the history of the Polish Poster School: Jan Jaromir
Aleksiun, Eugeniusz Get Stankiewicz (both of them were teachers at the Wrocław school) and Jerzy
Czerniawski. They based the form of their projects on surrealism - for them, a world of unhindered
imagination into which they smuggled motifs expressing the anxiety of the times they lived in (the
years of socialism and the restrictions imposed by it) and manifested their rejection of the system.
For the younger generation of artists focusing on artistic printmaking surrealism also became a space
of unhindered expression in which they could and still can present the plot of stories, set memories,
deal with anxieties and traumas, and finally - express their views on topical issues, thus using it as a
background for their ideological statements in which they concentrate, for instance, on problems
connected with an individual's life in the contemporary world.
The scope of topics presented by the Wrocław artists - and not only it - is constantly extended. The
community's energy initiated in the 1960s and manifested then in diversified explorations going
beyond the contemporary definition of art, still drives particularly the young artists towards new
printmaking techniques and improvements of the already existing ones, but also towards the extension
of printmaking by means of intermedia activities combining for instance printmaking with
photography, printmaking with sculpture and printmaking with installations, or activities in which it is
not the final effect but the very creation process that comes to the foreground.
The contemporary image of the Wrocław School of Printmaking is the product of the creativity of the
following artists: Jacek Szewczyk, Paweł Frąckiewicz, Christopher Nowicki, Przemysław
Tyszkiewicz, Anna Janusz-Strzyż, Małgorzata ETBER Warlikowska, Aleksandra Janik, Mariusz
Gorzelak, Agata Gertchen, Marta Kubiak, Anna Kodź, Magdalena Czerniawska, Sebastian Łubiński,
Wojciech Kołacz, Paweł Puzio, Marta Lech, Zuzanna Dyrda and Sofia Palma.
Author: Lena Czerniawska
Posted by: Paweł Puzio
