Zachęta National Gallery of Art

curator: Joanna Egit-Pużyńska
exhibition design: Andrzej Stroka

The exhibition coincided with the 50th anniversary of the artist's creative activity. Józef Wilkoń was born in 1930 in Bogucice near Wieliczka. He completed art history studies at the Jagiellonian University and painting studies at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts. In 1957, he did his first illus­trating job for the Nasza Księgarnia publisher, and the same year his illus­trations for K. I. Galczynski's The Warsaw Pigeons were awarded the gold medal at the Leipzig International Book Fair. By today, Wilkoń has illustrat­ed close to 200 books published in Poland and abroad, chiefly in France, Switzerland, Germany and Japan. He is renowned chiefly as an illustrator, but since the mid-1990s painting and sculpture have occupied a signifi­cant position in his art. The exhibition aimed at presenting precisely this part of the artist's work. Besides the most notable book illustrations, it showed not-for-publication wet-technique drawings and selected sculp­tures of polychromed wood, from small forms (fishes and birds), made in the mid-1990s, to the latest, shown for the first time, large animal figures. The eponymous monumental Ark was made specially for the exhibition. A seasonal accent came with the famous Bielany Nativity Barn, leased from the parish church in Warsaw's Bielany district and, for the exhibi­tion's duration, placed in front of the Zachęta building.