Date: 13.05.2023 – 23.07.2023
Inauguration: 13.05.2023, 5.30 pm
Venue: 4G, ul. Szeroka 34/35
Curator: Maria Sasin
Visual identification: Ania Witkowska
Grass’s Imaginarium
Grass. The Nobel Prize Laureate. Honorary Guest and Citizen of the City of Gdansk in the previous decade. He is an ambiguous figure, perhaps even controversial and incorrect. The Enfant terrible of Polish-German relations. Exasperating to many due to his frankness, lack of sophistication, with a patriarchal attitude at times, and complex Polish-German provenance. His equivocalness was the result of the time in which he happened to live. None of this, however, changes the fact that his Gdansk trilogy is one of the benchmarks for Gdansk literary writings; its milestone. Grass’s literary legacy remains an inexhaustible source of study and inspiration for contemporary scholars and authors.
Still, Grass was an exceptional figure and not only because of his merits in the field of literature. He was a sculptor and graphic artist by education but he treated his visual work on a par with his literary activities. For dozens of years, he successfully made prints, drawings and sculptures. However, he demonstrated a more conservative approach in the visual world, admitting that an object or objects in a drawing or print first of all denoted themselves. It is not some kind of reference to meanings beyond the image which makes these pieces important but the way in which they are drawn in pencil or ink. Grass would say, that if I change something in the knee, I have to change something in the ear because the proportions are linked to each other. It is precisely these links that make the image attractive and important, not some external sense which they indicate.
At the exhibition in the gallery dedicated to his name, we are now showing you a plethora of his prints, drawings and sculptures, coming from the collection of much more than one hundred works kept by the Gdansk City Gallery. We present Grass’s visual output with no unnecessary comments. Today, the links between his literary works and his visual imaginarium are obvious, emerging from one another. Thus, we invite you on a visual journey with Grass’s multi-threaded and magical creations and to discover these unobvious connections between the worlds of the word and the image.
This exhibition will also offer you an opportunity to take thematic strolls, during which we are going to invite you to learn more about Günter Grass’s work and explore his artistic vision of nature and the world. The first walk, inaugurating the exhibition, will take place on 13 May at 12:00 o’clock. We will set off from the Günter Grass Gallery in ulica Szeroka in Gdansk and stroll with Barbara Piórkowska to discover plant life in Gdansk’s Old Town and its surroundings. Next, in June, the charismatic guide Anna Kowalewska-Mróz will familiarise us with the threads of Gdańsk history and architecture in our Nobel Prize winner’s works.
At the end of the exhibition in July, in co-operation with the Palma Foundation and Natalia Koralewska, we will revisit Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz, the neighbourhood so beloved by Grass.
Partners:
