“I try to excavate and reveal everything that people hide behind their clothes, that they carry inside. That’s what I am most interested in,” said Jerzy Duda-Gracz about his work. The artist who passed away in 2004 painted people immersed in a dull reality with all their flaws and quirks, longing for beauty and harmony. His paintings, sometimes compared to those by Pieter Bruegel, stir powerful emotions and frequently caused controversy during his lifetime.

A retrospective of his works held in 2015 at the gallery of the Nowa Huta Cultural Centre launched the partnership between Kraków and the artist’s family, resulting with an agreement with his daughter about opening a permanent Jerzy Duda-Gracz Gallery in Nowa Huta. From January 2020 the exhibition space at the Nowa Huta Cultural Centre presents around a hundred of paintings on rotation. Over the two decades, we will see over three hundred works from the family collection.

The idea behind the latest exhibition is to showcase the most important themes in the artist’s works – not just the best-known, popular ones but also those which permeate his entire oeuvre. The first is passing and death – of people, of ideas, of landscapes. The other is things we easily ignore – the background and the provincial. The exhibition presents works form different periods of his life, showing how his artistic style changed over the years. The meticulous attention to detail in earlier works gradually gives way to a vaguer, more expressive and impressionist style. (Agata Duda-Gracz)

Fri-Sun 1-7pm
tickets PLN 20/15