WITKACY AND OTHERS

The exhibition Witkacy and Others is held as part of a cyclical programme presenting the most interesting private collections of contemporary and modern art. The programme was initiated in 2010 with the show 20th Century Photography from the Collection of Cezary Pieczyński and is now continued with a presentation of the collection of Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak.

The exhibition presents a unique collection that includes a large body of photographic work by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, known as Witkacy, as well as works by other photographers active in the 19th and 20th centuries. The main part of the show is devoted to Witkacy, one of the most outstanding fi gures in 20th century Polish art: a novelist and playwright, philosopher and art theoretician, painter, photographer, draughtsman, portraitist; an artist who has long fascinated scholars and the public alike with his persona as a writer and painter, and in more recent years increasingly as a ‘demonic photographer’. Okołowicz and Franczak’s unique collection shows Witkacy as an avid fan of photography, busy both making photographs and collecting them. The exhibition features his famous self-portraits, an illustration of the biographical legend of a ‘great eccentric’; series of photographs in which he transformed into a mime-theatre director and actor, enacting his own look-alikes for the camera; photographic portraits of the artist’s friends, as well as interwar artistic and intellectual celebrities; scenes improvised for the camera, staged by Witkacy and his friends; series of early mountain and sea landscapes, their framing innovative and much diff erent from 19th century conventions; images of train engines; photographs in which the artist experimented with double exposure; and examples of photographic documentation of his own works, including a selection from a large set of about 100 images of his lost drawings. Also on display will be Witkacy’s drawings and paintings.