Zbigniew M. DOWGIAŁŁO (born 1961), Solidarity 1981

oil, canvas; 137 x 160 cm;
Signature p. d.: DOWGIAŁŁO;
Signed and dated on back: 1981/ Z. M. DOWGIAŁŁO.
The painting has been exhibited many times, most recently: Kunst der Freith, New Expression of the 1980s, Fighting, Ku?hlhous gallery, Berlin, 2017.

Graduate of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts under Stefan Gierowski, Jan Tarasin and Ryszard Winiarski. The offered painting, painted in 1981, is one of the first works created in the New Expression trend. The artist's canvases were presented at exhibitions at SARP and the Norblin Factory where the artistic community of the 1980s was concentrated, thanks to the efforts of Andrzej Bonarski. In addition, Maciej Z. Dowgiałła's paintings were presented at the National Museum in Warsaw at the presentation "Radical Realism - Concrete Abstraction" and "Polish Chic" at the Warsaw Zachęta Gallery. In the late 1980s, the artist moved to New York where he continued his creative work and developed a new direction in his
creativity: futuro baroque, using computer graphics solutions.
Maciej Z. Dowgiałło, together with Wojciech Tracewski, among others, took part in the New Expression exhibitions organized in the 1980s, about which Lukasz Gorczyca commented as follows: "(...) Bonarski's exhibitions cultivated a kind of no-man's land by offering artistic events that were completely independent of official cultural policy, while at the same time going beyond the environmental ghetto and tickling the snobbish impulses of the social and cultural elite with their aura of truly private initiative (....) Most of the exhibitions, by the way, took place in spaces not normally associated with contemporary art - in the exhibition pavilion of SARP and in the post-industrial interiors of the former Norblin Works, which emphasized all the more their peculiar extraterritoriality, uniqueness and phenomenality. (...)
(...) Independence - the word fetish, which in the 1980s was used in all cases and exploited by both politically engaged opposition circles and the young music or art scene, was a neat euphemism to describe attitudes of freedom, emancipation, pro-democracy, but also an artistic alternative to the cultural mainstream. Bonarski's exhibition activities were thus part of this broad social movement of "independence" on another, institutional level. His exhibitions were "independent" not only artistically and not only from the standards of the artistic community, but above all freed from the official procedures defining the rules of organizing cultural events or the business regulations of the time. (...)"
(Excerpts of statements from a conference held at the MSN in Warsaw on: September 26-27, 2011, Rejected Heritage. On Polish Art of the 1980s, Łukasz Gorczyca, Polish Chic and the Middle Class. Exhibition activity of Andrzej Bonarski 1986-1991, Warsaw 2011)