Jerzy Grzegorzewski, Did you really have to ask me this question?!

09.04-30.05 2015

Commemorating the 10th anniversary of Jerzy Grzegorzewski’s death,  the aTAK Gallery presents an exhibition devoted and dedicated to the artist and showing one of Poland’s leading theatre directors as a painter. He always regarded himself as a painter. A young alumnus of the State College (today Academy) of Fine Arts in Łódź, he began a promising career exhibiting his pictures at the Krzywe Koło Gallery in Warsaw alongside a host of distinguished painters. Our exhibition is an attempt at the reconstruction of Grzegorzewski’s painterly pursuits during the early period preceding his involvement in theatre and also in his later years when – already a famous and successful director – he would briefly return to painting and produce a series of abstract oil pictures in the later 1980s.

The exhibition’s organizing idea is to present Grzegorzewski’s works juxtaposed with pieces by the period’s leading painters. Alongside its focus on painting, the exhibition also showcases Grzegorzewski’s other passions, first of all his passion for collecting unusual objects which he accumulated in his Warsaw apartment creating an imaginary artistic space in which dreams could unfold and ideas develop. He was not able to realize all of them but some he would discuss with those dear to him. We have tried to make some of his ideas a reality. Grzegorzewski’s unique and highly original approach to reality was the defining feature of his personality. Underlain by a sense of humor and love of beauty, it was animated by ambiguity and disregard for established canons. Therefore, while preparing this exhibition we have tried to think on Grzegorzewski’s terms and create a kind of space with which the artist would identify, to portray him – detached from theatre – through the world of dreams in which the painter figure was a dream role.

Curator: Jerzy Wojciechowski

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