Beyond Constructivism

The exhibition brings together the work of two avant-garde artists born in Łódź: Karol Hiller and Włodzimierz Jan Zakrzewski. Although they never met and belonged to different generations, their artistic practices reveal a remarkable number of shared concerns. Karol Hiller, regarded as one of the leading figures of the Polish interwar avant-garde, studied under Mykhailo Boichuk, the Kyiv-based painter and scholar of Byzantine art. Zakrzewski, in turn, was deeply influenced by his family background: his mother, who was born in Russia, came from an Orthodox family deeply rooted in the traditions of Eastern Christianity. These distinct yet complementary cultural contexts resonate throughout their work. A common denominator in the practice of both artists is its layered complexity, both formally and conceptually. Hiller's heliographs contain references to the lives of Łódź's working class during the 1930s. A committed socialist, deeply sensitive to the hardships endured by industrial workers, he simultaneously drew inspiration from Constructivism and from the modern fascination with technology and the machine. Zakrzewski, by contrast, employs the language of geometry to address emotions, places, and historical events. In works such as Battles and Akslop (a negative image of Poland), he uses a restrained, highly distilled visual vocabulary to evoke the approaching end of the world as we know it. Hiller's Heliographic Composition XXXIV, created just one year before his tragic death, depicts human heads from which rays of light emerge in place of faces. The motif assumes the force of a visual scream—an expression of despair and a form of protest. Writing about Zakrzewski's work, particularly Cruel Pessimism, Robert C. Morgan described it as a profound dialogue between reason and spirituality, science and faith, knowledge and meaning. A similar reading can be applied to Hiller's oeuvre, in which modernity and technological progress confront fundamental questions of human existence and spiritual experience.