A Difficult Age. Szapocznikow – Wajda – Wróblewski

“A Difficult Age. Szapocznikow – Wajda – Wróblewski” presents the work of Poland’s most prominent and widely acclaimed post-war artists: film director Andrzej Wajda (1926–2016), conceptual sculptor Alina Szapocznikow (1926–1973), and painter Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957). The exhibit’s main theme is an exploration of the adolescent experiences endured by these three artists – all born in the same period and all having lost a parent early in life – and the impact of these events on their work. The unprecedented scale of brutality committed during the Second World War left a profound mark on the lives of all three artists. The curator of the exhibition, the legendary Polish art historian and curator Anda Rottenberg, reveals how the same symbols and metaphors repeat themselves in different areas of art: painting, cinema, and sculpture.

The title of the exhibition “A Difficult Age” is borrowed from Alina Szapocznikow’s sculpture from 1956, depicting a teenage figure. A Difficult Age refers both to a difficult, tragic historical time, and one of the most important and complicated periods of human maturation – adolescence.

The exhibition also marks a historic moment by representing painter Andrzej Wróblewski at MO Museum who was born and raised in Vilnius. Wróblewski’s connection to Vilnius and his significance for art in Poland in the latter half of the twentieth century became the main reason for the organization of this exhibition at MO Museum.

The exhibition is conceived as a variation of the exhibition “Perspective of Adolescence. Szapocznikow – Wróblewski – Wajda”, which took place in the summer of 2018 at the Silesian Museum in Katowice.

The exhibition was organized together with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw. Special thanks to the Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation and the custodians of Alina Szapocznikow’s legacy – the artist’s son Piotr Stanislawski, Galerie Loevenbruck and the Hauser & Wirth Gallery.