Over three hundred paintings, sculptures, montages, spatial installations, prints and drawings are shown at the exhibition Wprost 1966-1986 at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology. The exhibition presents the history of the Wprost [Outright – trans.] collective – one of the most fascinating and unusual phenomena in Poland’s art of the second half of the 20th century.
“We want to express ourselves outright, without passing over anything in the arts: symbolism, meaningful forms, materials used for expression,” states the group’s manifesto which accompanied their first exhibition at the Palace of Art. In a period dominated by abstraction, the five graduates from Kraków’s Academy of Fine Arts – Maciej Bieniasz, Zbylut Grzywacz, Barbara Skąpska, Leszek Sobocki and Jacek Waltoś – were joined by their belief to renew the dialogue between the world of the arts and humankind. Preceding neo-figurative art, popular in the 1970s and 1980s, members of the collective presented the complex existential situation experienced by their peers. Favouring art expressing current topics, they conveyed how their generation responded to social and political problems of their day.
