Andrzej Wróblewski, Rider

Andrzej Wróblewski painted a painting entitled The Horseman, probably in 1956, and the work was executed in gouache on paper. Wróblewski was the artist who most clearly expressed in his art the horror of generational experience - the war and the formal rift. An important strand of his work was works on paper: numerous watercolours, gouaches, drawings and monotypes. Their small format makes them more intimate and reveals a lesser-known side of the artist's personality. Using a very synthetic, emblematic form, he addressed fundamental existential issues. What emerges from them is a unique - marked by an obsession with death, though not without a peculiar humour and grotesque - image of the world and man. Particularly intriguing in the painter's works is the tension between abstraction and figuration, as well as modernity and socialist realism. Wróblewski's work has influenced Polish New Figuration (mainly artists from the Krakow 'Wprost' group) and the 'wild' painting of the 1980s (primarily Jarosław Modzelewski from the Warsaw 'Gruppa').