Henryk Streng – Marek Włodarski. Modernizm
The exhibition focuses on the work of the Polish–Jewish Modernist Henryk Streng (after WWII named Marek Włodarski, 1898–1960). He was active as a painter in interwar Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) and postwar Warsaw.
Henryk Streng - Marek Włodarski
Henryk Streng is someone who contributes to the decolonization of knowledge about the culture of east part of Europe. He developed an original take on Modernism, before becoming a rather unorthodox Socialist–Realist.
Streng / Włodarski drew on Polish–Jewish culture, was a Holocaust survivor and continued to maintain an identity rooted in genocide. He was a witness to history and bore the brunt of the dehumanizing experience of two totalitarian systems: Nazism and Stalinism.
Tracing a path through his life and works, this exhibition offers insight into artistic phenomena that were of crucial significance to Central and Eastern Europe before, during and after the Second World War. Rather than refer to the French Avant-garde, it sheds light on local adaptations of Modernism. It peels back the surface of Socialist–Realism to reveal a broad spectrum of socially-engaged art, including 1930s Factorealism and socialist Modern art of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
In place of an exclusivist and overly homogeneous vision of Polish culture, the exhibition stresses the complexity of identity in the cultural melting pot of the multi-ethnic, Polish–Jewish–Ukrainian city of Lwów (Lviv). It also focuses attention on the limit experiences of the war that left their mark on artefacts from the camps, on artistic objects and on artworks.
curator/ Piotr Słodkowski
