2024-11-19
The exhibition at the National Museum in Warsaw, which closes in three weeks' time, will feature more than 500 works by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. The exhibition entitled: "Witkacy. Seismograph of the Age of Acceleration" has so far been visited by more than 40 000 people. The event is accompanied by an extensive programme of events and a bilingual publication.
It seems that the greatest distinguishing feature of the ongoing exhibition of Witkacy's works is its concept. Its creators wanted to depart from the traditional narrative and, to this end, abandoned the presentation of works in chronological order in favour of setting the master's work in contexts. Thus, the works were grouped around the following concepts: cosmos, body, history, metaphysical feeling, crisis of culture. Moreover, Witkacy's works were presented against the background of the works of European modernists such as Wassili Kandinsky, Umberto Boccioni and Max Ernst.
The works were borrowed from, among others, the Tatra Museum in Zakopane and the Central Pomerania Museum in Słupsk. The exhibition also features, works previously kept in storage at the National Museum in Warsaw. The curators of the event are Zofia Machnicka and Paweł Polit. In the name of the project, they wanted to reflect the artist's creative traits, whose works, like a seismograph, recorded important changes in the times he lived. Interestingly, in an interview with a radio station, one of the creators of the exhibition said that the museum team had been working on the exhibition for more than two years.
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz was a writer, painter, philosopher, playwright and photographer. The artist's first teacher was his father: a painter, architect, writer and creator of the Zakopane style. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, he studied under Jan Stanisławski and Józef Mehoffer. The artist created the concept of the so-called Pure Form. According to it, the most important component of a work of art is its form, which influences the viewer, evoking "metaphysical feelings" in him. Around 1925, Witkacy gave up oil painting and founded the "S.I. Witkiewicz Portrait Company". After the outbreak of World War II, he fled from the Germans to the eastern borderlands, where he committed suicide on 18 September 1939.