Image: Edward Dwurnik, "Harvest Disaster" from the "Large Paintings" series, 1975, oil and acrylic paint on canvas. National Museum in Krakow. Photo: Edward Dwurnik Foundation
The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw is presenting ‘Edward Dwurnik. Duma i wstyd’ from 31 July 2026 to 28 February 2027, curated by Łukasz Ronduda. The museum’s own exhibition page frames it around the artist’s work of the 1970s and 1980s, built on his two main painting cycles, ‘Sportowcy’ and ‘Robotnicy’. According to Culture.pl’s Piotr Policht, the decade was a turning point in Dwurnik’s career: first he was hailed as a prophet, then rejected by the artistic milieu. The exhibition runs until 28 February 2027.
The newsletter’s notice highlights paintings from some of Dwurnik’s best-known series, including 'Sportowcy' and 'Robotnicy'. It notes that many of the works on view were made in the 1980s, the period Policht describes as the most visually compelling in Dwurnik’s career and perhaps the most important for the formation of his full artistic personality as a cynic. The source also identifies one of the featured works as 'Zabity robol' from the 'Robotnicy' cycle, dated 1984.
Dwurnik’s work spans several decades, but the article places particular emphasis on the way the 1980s shaped his reputation. In the account quoted by Culture.pl, he moved within a short time from being celebrated as a visionary figure to being excluded by the art world. That tension is central to the framing of 'Duma i wstyd', which uses the decade’s paintings to revisit both the breadth and the contradictions of his practice.
The exhibition sits within the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw’s ongoing programme of large-scale presentations of important Polish art. In this case, the museum is showing work by one of the country’s most recognisable postwar painters through a lens that foregrounds a particularly productive and contested period. The museum states that the show reconstructs the artistic position Dwurnik formed around the turn of the 1960s and 1970s — a rejection of art’s elitism, affinities with outsider art and painting understood as a document of social life — and reads his work through the history of social emotions in Poland, pride and shame, tied to class change. The presentation is credited as being made in cooperation with the Edward Dwurnik Foundation, and it is accompanied by an artistic intervention by Patryk Różycki, ‘Transformacja’, drawing on works from 2021 to 2024.
Culture.pl’s newsletter presents the exhibition alongside other cultural coverage, but its main art note is straightforward: Dwurnik’s Warsaw retrospective remains on view through February 2027, and the works on display include paintings from 'Sportowcy' and 'Robotnicy'. The newsletter frames those works as part of a body of art that marked both the high point of the decade and a decisive phase in the artist’s development.
