Jerzy Duda Gracz, ŁAGÓW - EXTRAORDINARY GRZESZKI, 1996

51.5 x 91.0cm - oil, fiberboard signed l.d: DUDA GRACZ . 1996/96 .

On the reverse, on the middle board, the author's sticker with the details of the painting, next to it the export stamp and the number of the permission to export abroad, below the sticker the dedication: To Mr. Zygmunt [crossed out] Zenon Żyburtowicz | with friendship | Jerzy Duda - G. 10.06. 2004.; at the g. edge the arrow mark and the date 6 V 96

Reproduced image:

- Duda Gracz. Provincial and Municipal Images. Polish Borderlands 2000, ed. Monika Branicka, Silesian Library, Katowice, p. 17, il. 2 color.



The work belongs to a series of Provincial-Commune Paintings created since 1986, in which the artist abandons his role as a mocker of communist reality and begins to proclaim praise for the province and the beauty of nature. Duda Gracz visits towns and villages, including Kamion, Zarzecze, Brzegi, Zakopane or the eponymous Lagow, to record the passing world and its inhabitants in his paintings.

He often makes the hero of his paintings a woman - here, watched by a somewhat embarrassed altar boy. In an interview he said: A woman gives life, accompanies a man in passing, is a symbol of love, the cause of political events, and finally appears as a horror in the form of death. She is a temptation, an angel, she can be Satan, she constitutes all the doings of mankind (Gabriela Łęcka, Jerzy Duda-Gracz. Painter of "Unobtanium Land," interview with the artist, "Evening Express," No. 2627, 31 I - 2 II 1997).

The background of the scene becomes lush nature, which is a full-fledged protagonist here, and perhaps completes the symbolic layer of the painting by alluding to the motif of the tree of paradise, tempting with its fruits.

♣ 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 Act 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, Krakow, Poznan, Wroclaw and Gdansk, the Jagiellonian University Museum in Collegium Maius in Krakow, 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 the galleries and collections of Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Israel, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the USA, Venezuela, the UK, Italy and Hungary.