Dwurnik’s Pride and Shame

Edward Dwurnik often emphasized that painting saved his life. He described himself as a “simple boy,” a “hooligan growing up in the provinces,” raised “in an environment full of violence and contempt,” and added that if it weren’t for his passion for drawing, he “would probably have ended up badly.” This deliberately constructed narrative about his own origins served to underscore his status as an enfant terrible in the art world, while also providing an opportunity to renegotiate the experience of social advancement that art had made possible for him. The son of a small craftsman from Radzymin, he was the first person in his family to earn a college degree. This sudden change in social status was accompanied by a strong sense of alienation from the milieu from which he came. In 1965, while still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, the artist decided to set out into provincial Poland by hitchhiking and to paint the people and places he encountered. He had the ambition to to depict the lives of ordinary Poles as representatives of the community to which he still felt he belonged.

– To portray Polish society, Dwurnik drew inspiration from large-format realist and historical painting. This approach was an attempt to find an egalitarian form capable of encompassing the collective experience. He wanted the monumental format of historical painting to become a tool for fostering pride in one’s origins, to elevate everyday situations, but also to shed the shame associated with provincialism and coming from nowhere. The protagonists of his paintings, which we will see at the MSN, express collective aspirations, frustrations, and dreams. His painting is intended not so much to depict social reality as to shift the perspective on what is considered worthy of attention,” says exhibition curator Łukasz Ronduda.

He treated the act of painting itself as a grueling, physical process requiring discipline and consistency. Edward Dwurnik consistently rejected the notion of the artist as a privileged individual who stands above the world of labor. He compared his own practice to everyday life in a factory, and himself to an “art worker.” Just as his father, a laborer, produced metal objects in a workshop, so he produced paintings in his studio. He painted quickly, almost compulsively, one painting after another; as he himself put it, he “churned out paintings.” Within his series, subtle shifts, differences, and tensions emerge, allowing us to grasp the fluidity of social experience. The serial nature thus becomes a method cognitive: a way of depicting the working class in its typicality and, at the same time, its heterogeneity. The structure of the exhibition *Edward Dwurnik: Pride and Shame* is based on emphasizing this serial nature, a certain “factory-like” mechanical quality of his painting.

Pride and Shame

The starting point for the exhibition presented at the MSN was the desire to reconstruct Dwurnik’s life stance—which was also the foundation of his artistic approach—shaped at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. It was characterized by a rejection of the elitism of art, connections to outsider art, and the concept of painting as a document of social life. Dwurnik believed in realistic painting that participated in life and treated it as an egalitarian language that helps communicate with the people portrayed in the paintings. He believed in painting that helps express and build community.

Łukasz Ronduda therefore proposes interpreting the artist’s work from the perspective of the history of social emotions in Poland during the second half of the 20th century—in particular, the constant clash between two emotions that shape the experience of class transformation: pride and shame. These emotions extend far beyond the realm of private experience, as they regulate belonging, recognition, and one’s place in the social hierarchy; indeed, they determine the sense of worth or worthlessness of one’s own existence and identity. In Dwurnik’s paintings from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, both of these emotions recur constantly; they are present in the events, stories, and images of characters struggling for recognition. Without recognizing this emotional genealogy of social life, it is difficult to understand the sources of the resentments and conflicts that shape the contemporary Polish political imagination and serve as the roots of modern populism.

– Edward Dwurnik’s work is a fundamental and indispensable point of reference for contemporary—even the most avant-garde—thinking about painting and visual culture in Central Europe. For me personally, as his daughter and an artist, it is important that the exhibition is taking place at an institution that explores the most current and significant manifestations of artistic life in our region. Never before has my father’s work been placed within the context of the complex history of the generation that is currently shaping contemporary Poland. The exhibition makes a thorough attempt to capture and understand the essence of Dwurnik’s work, which, through masterful paintings, reveals the truth about Polish society that shapes its self-awareness and identity,” says Pola Dwurnik.

Edward Dwurnik’s work, presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in two major painting series titled Athletes and Workers, shows how society produces phantasms of social advancement, social decline, normality, and disgrace. The paintings reveal that beneath the surface of Polish modernity, unresolved emotions—concerning origin, lifestyle, and one’s place in the social hierarchy—are constantly at work. Pride and Shame is a narrative spanning successive decades in which the same emotional structures recur within shifting political contexts.

Dwurnik’s exhibition is accompanied by Patryk Różycki’s artistic intervention *Transformation*. It features a selection of his works from 2021–2024. The series of paintings explores the artist’s childhood and adolescence in the countryside, marked by the economic and social exclusion associated with the transformation of the 1990s.

Edward Dwurnik. Pride and Shame

along with the artistic intervention

Transformations
by Patryk Różycki

July 31, 2026–February 28, 2027

Curator: Łukasz Ronduda