The Andrzej Wróblewski. Waiting Room exhibition opened on October 15, 2020, in Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, one of Europe’s most prestigious museums of modern art. It will stay on display till January 10, 2021. For those who are interested in the artist’s work and cannot travel to Ljubljana the show is now available online.
The exhibition consists of 121 works created mainly in the years 1955–57. Some of the works are inspired by Wróblewski and the art critic Barbara Majewska’s 1956 trip to Yugoslavia. A large number of these paintings have never been exhibited or were last shown to the public in 1958. The exhibition also features works by artists from former Yugoslavia, including some whom Wróblewski met personally, that build a common context and often establish a direct dialogue with Wróblewski. The curators of the exhibition are Magdalena Ziółkowska and Wojciech Grzybała from the Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation, and Marko Jenko from Moderna galerija. The exhibition and its online version were produced in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
Thanks to the dedicated platform—waitingroom.andrzejwroblewski.pl—you can take a virtual walk around the exhibition and see all of the works presented in the space of Moderna galerija, across six rooms with a total area of over 800 m2. All visitors are presented with a selection of texts devoted to the exhibition, including an essay written by Magdalena Ziółkowska and Wojciech Grzybała, entitled “Waiting Room as a Harbinger” from the publication accompanying the exhibition. It also features video content—Barbara Majewska reminiscing about Andrzej Wróblewski and their joint trip to Yugoslavia in the fall of 1956, the documentation from the exhibition opening and a video of the curators conducting a guided tour of the show. The website—waitingroom.andrzejwroblewski.pl—is available in three languages: English, Polish and Slovenian.
Catalogue
The project is accompanied by a catalogue with the same title, published in English, with seven critical essays by Ivana Bago, Branislav Dimitrijević, Wojciech Grzybała, Marko Jenko, Ljiljana Kolešnik, Ewa Majewska, and Magdalena Ziółkowska. The publication also includes the presentation of archival materials, photographs from Wróblewski and Majewska’s trip, and reproductions of 220 works by the artist. The catalogue is co-published and distributed by Hatje Cantz in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
Andrzej Wróblewski was a painter, historian, and art critic, and one of the key figures of post-1945 Central and Eastern European art. Born in 1927 in Vilnius, he graduated in art history from the Jagiellonian University and the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, where he became an assistant in the Faculty of Painting. He received a special mention at the Bucharest Festival (1953), took part in numerous nationwide art exhibitions, including the famous show at the Arsenał in 1955 Against War, Against Fascism, and a solo exhibition of works on paper at the Club of the Polish Writers’ Union, Warsaw in February 1956, organized with the help of friends, including Andrzej Wajda.
In the same year, from October 30 to November 21, he travelled to Yugoslavia with art critic Barbara Majewska. Their three-week stay in Belgrade, Ljubljana, Skopje, Zagreb, and in smaller towns such as Portoroż, Piran, Ohrid, included not only participation in the artistic life of the then Yugoslavia, but also walks through picturesque streets, visiting ethnographic collections, and learning about architectural monuments. These experiences were reflected in the work created during the last months before Wróblewski’s unexpected death in 1957, during his last walk in the Tatra Mountains.
