Collection

In the 1990s, after many years of creating paintings dominated by the colour green, Edward Dwurnik began working on a series of blue bird’s-eye-view cityscapes. The artist filled the streets of Maastricht with monumental heads featured in his other pieces, in an allusion to characters tying in to the history of a specific location or an artwork he recalled from a visit to the local museum. The symbol-filled vision of the perfect city has been expanded to include elements ripped out from another reality, such as tanks crossing a bridge. They may be a reminder that treaties regulating the defence policy of European Union member states were signed in Maastricht.

Painter and draughtsman. A painting and graphic arts graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, he was one of the most vibrant characters on the Polish art scene, with a presence in popular and mainstream culture. To Dwurnik, Nikifor Krynicki was the most important artist and inspiration in the choice of themes, working methods, and style. Dwurnik’s oeuvre, ironic and grotesque, chiefly includes expansive painting cycles, rendered with a fine paintbrush in semblance of Nikifor, with recurrent social, political, and social drama motifs, produced in multiple copies, often simultaneously. His bird’s-eye-view cityscapes created over a number of decades from the mid-1960s are the cycle he is best known for. He painted his first set of abstract paintings, which he called “pollocks”, in the early 2000s. He participated in Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982. Winner of numerous awards, including the Cyprian Kamil Norwid Award (1981) and the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award (1992). He lived and worked in Warsaw.