Jan Dobkowski rejected textural solutions stemming from post-impressionism while he was still studying. He eliminated the painterly space from the painting, filling the surface of the canvas with large flat fields of lightly applied colour. He limited the colour range to two contrasting complementary colours: red and green. The line outlining the shapes flowed in restless, meandering turns, creating Art Deco-like decorative arrangements. Despite deformation and exaggeration of shapes, his paintings are subjective rather than abstract. The repertoire of repeating motifs includes, among others, multiplied breasts with heavily marked nipples, heads with strands of hair resembling flames, human skeletons, hearts, sperm, and embryonic shapes. They express symbolic themes: the joy of life and the fertility of nature constantly undergoing change.

In 1969, the artist cut out from chipboard, as he put it, ‘many-breasted women, apple-women, bird-women, pear-women’. Dobkowski’s premise was to present them in open space, at a time when nature is dormant. They were photographed as the series Prolongation of Summer among TV antennas on the roof of the residential block in the ‘Za Żelazną Bramą’ housing estate in Warsaw’s Wola district, where the artist and his wife lived. They were also presented as part of the CBWA Zachęta-organised series of exhibitions popularising contemporary art in workplaces: they were hung along with Jerzy ‘Jurry’ Zieliński’s New Creation of the World spatial silhouettes in the factory hall of the ‘Polfa’ Tarchomin Pharmaceutical Works in Warsaw.

Transferring motifs outside of the two-dimensional surface of the canvas and photographing them in the real world testifies to Dobkowski’s spatial interests. Works presented in this way demanded a dynamic gaze from the moving observer, who thus became a co-creator of the work. Similar experiments with space appeared in avant-garde art as early as the beginning of the 20th century; therefore, Dobkowski can be included in the long line of artists interested in this issue for more than a century.

Ewa Skolimowska, translated by Paulina Bożek