Jerzy “Jurry” Zieliński: paintings

A solo exhibition of paintings by the Polish artist and poet Jerzy “Jurry” Zieliński(1943-1980) opens at Luxembourg & Dayan London. In a series of paintings that conflate the aesthetics of Communist propaganda with the signifiers of Pop Art and tropes of Art Nouveau, Zieliński deployed an esoteric series of symbols to explore life’s grand themes of national identity, religion, eroticism and politics. Strategically paring his palette down to flattened areas of red, white, blue and green, and working within a set group of repeated emblems, Zieliński radically departed from the somberness expected of Polish art. One of the rare Polish artists to take up the Pop Art style during the 1960s and ‘70s, he made works that used a sly reverse psychology replete with potent anti-Establishment messages. Owing to its radical intent, Zieliński’s work has long been neglected by the Polish art historical mainstream and is only just receiving recognition internationally for its relationship to the wider tides of postwar art.

For Zieliński, the distilled language of Pop Art was the ideal vehicle to propell a distinctive style that was shot through with witty, incisive comments on the dilemmas of the age. While Pop Art in the West was primarily concerned with consumer culture and mass media, Zieliński’s version investigated a more austere set of political concerns. The purposeful simplification and reliance upon stylized symbols in Zieliński’s canvases functioned in direct opposition to Poland’s national doctrine of Social Realism, which informed ‘acceptable’ painting both before and after the Stalinization of Communist Poland. Appropriating the familiar iconography of Communist propaganda posters, Zieliński converted the power of a limited visual syntax into social critique.

Transcending monolithic interpretation, Zieliński’s sometimes grotesque, sometimes humorous, and always lush paintings reference the dualities of hedonism and asceticism, pleasure and protest. By limiting his iconography to symbols already bloated with historical and social connotations, Zieliński was able to suggest that meaning can be reconfigured via context and intention.