Adam Marczyński
Adam Marczyński’s work was founded on ongoing experimentation, frequently changing inspirations and directions of explorations. Markedly expressive at first, the artist’s practice in the 1930s revealed his fascination with Cubism and Colourism, while witnessing an increasingly clear turn towards Abstraction and Surrealism, bearing reference to the work of Paul Klee and Joan Miró. In the post-war years, Marczyński took an interest in the problematic of matter, and his works gradually began to make forays into space: he created painting-objects with the use of non-painterly materials, which soon evolved into assemblages and geometric reliefs. The painting presented in the exhibition, Industrial Landscape, was created immediately after the artist’s studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, during which he was loosely associated with the avant-garde, politically engaged Kraków Group. The non-realist, grim representation of an industrial city contains an element of sensitivity to social affairs characteristic of the Kraków Group members. Marczyński portrays a scene from the life of the working class, which in the 1930s suffered heavily the consequences of the economic crisis in Poland. The artist approaches the topic in a personal auteur way. He paints in a large format, alludes to Post-Impressionism, uses simplified synthetic forms, and seeks to operate with colours and the painting’s texture.
Adam Marczyński (b. 1908, d. 1985 in Kraków) – painter, graphic artist, sculptor. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków between 1930 and 1936. He exhibited his works alongside the First Kraków Group and from 1957 was also active in the Second Kraków Group. Between 1945 and his retirement Marczyński ran a painting studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. His work featured experiments with various tendencies in modern painting: Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstraction, and Matter Painting. Later he turned towards construction by creating spatial pieces in the form of assemblages and collages.
