The exhibition at FOTOHOF foregrounds the complexity in the work of Jerzy Lewczyński. The juxtaposition of his icons, such as “Crucification“ and “Wawel heads“, together with snapshots in color and unpublished photographic notes in black and white, shows his contemporary approach to the representation of reality. The unexpected, the ironic, the found, the accidental, and the anti-photographic – all of these are encountered by the viewer.
Jerzy Lewczyński (born 1924), trained as an engineer, has been a major protagonist of the Polish art scene since the 1950s, and as a photographer, historian, and photo-activist is characterized by an ironic view of the everyday constellations that surround him.
At the end of the 1960s, the themes of the past and memory became increasingly important in Lewczyński’s work: he began collecting old, destroyed negatives, which he then processed, thereby reviving people, incidents and places. From these works arose a private archive in Lewczyński’s apartment – his own photographic work mixed with found images, snapshots of memories, documentation of artistic actions, records, letters, historical documents and books. This reappraisal led him to formulate the theoretical concept of the “archaeology of photography“.

This presentation of classic Polish photography is juxtaposed with a contemporary work by photographer and art historian Krzysztof Pijarski (born 1980). Referring to Lewczyński, he developed an artistic project around the archive of his model. Pijarski selected a number of motifs that we know from Lewczyński’s work and created panel paintings around them – in the style of Aby Warburg – that illustrate the connections between the motifs. In these twelve pictures, Lewczyński’s playful approach to photography is again clarified by Pijarski’s work.