Signed l.d.: DUDA GRACZ . 1501/92 .
on the reverse on the plate the author's sticker with the data of the painting
A love of landscape became apparent in Jerzy Duda Gracz's work in the second half of the 1980s. Landscape is most often the backdrop for figures and genre scenes, and less often appears as an independent subject. On the featured canvas, a figure of a child wrapped in a still-winter jacket crouches shyly in a clearing in front of a forest wall. The entire composition is framed on the border between reality and fairy-tale, a tendency the artist admits to in Notes on Life and the Art of Passing [introduction to the catalog Duda Gracz, Provincial and Municipal Paintings, Polish Borderlands 2000, Silesian Library Publishing House]: [...] since 1986, when painting "provincial-commune" paintings, I use mere elements and quotations from reality in order to create a world that does not exist. That's right! I don't notice telephone poles, power grids, gas stations [...]. I paint a world of unfulfilled dreams, a world composed of shreds of memory, images, old photographs, conversations, longing, fears, love, bitterness, anger and warmth.
♣ to the auctioned price, in addition to other costs, will be added a fee resulting from the right of the artist and his heirs to receive remuneration in accordance with the Law of February 4, 1994 - on Copyright and Related Rights (droit de suite)
Jerzy Duda Gracz (Częstochowa 1941 - Łagów 2004)- painter, illustrator, stage designer, educator. He received his diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow at the Department of Graphics in Katowice in 1968. In 1976-82 he was a lecturer at the academy, then a professor at the Silesian University in Katowice. He also taught at the European Academy of Arts in Warsaw (1992-2001).
His paintings are characterized by technical virtuosity and attention to detail. He practiced art in the broadly defined realist convention with dominant figure deformation and grotesque. He created a world of unmasking, using the language of journalism and allegory. He is the author of several major projects, including the "Transfiguration" plafond in the church in Toporovo (1995) and the "Golgotha of Jasna Gora" series in the Monastery of the Pauline Fathers in Czestochowa (2000/2001).
The artist has had more than 180 solo exhibitions at home and abroad (including Berlin, London, Paris, Moscow, Rome, Vienna, Florence, Düsseldorf, Chicago, New Delhi, Munich, New York and others). He participated in about 300 national exhibitions and international presentations of Polish art. He represented Poland, among others, at the XLI Art Biennale in Venice in 1984, at the XX and XXI World Art Fairs in Cologne in 1986 and 1987, and at EXPO '92 in Seville.
Jerzy Duda Player's paintings are in the collections of the National Museum in Warsaw, Cracow, Poznan, Wroclaw and Gdansk, the Jagiellonian University Museum in Collegium Maius in Cracow, the Museum of the Earth of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, the art collection at Jasna Gora in Czestochowa and other district and city museums, and in private collections, including those of W. Ochman and W. Fibak; abroad - in the collections of the Uffizi in Florence, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Ghent City Museum, the "BAWAG" Foundation in Vienna and the Vatican Collection, as well as in galleries and collections in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Israel, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the USA, Venezuela, Great Britain, Italy and Hungary.
