The Artistic Quest of Marek Oberländer ()
In 2022, the National Museum in Wrocław was presented with 474 ink, pencil, and watercolour drawings by Marek Oberländer (1922–1978). This magnanimous gift of the artist’s widow Halina Pfeffer-Oberländer offers new insights into Marek Oberländer’s creative journey which was inextricably rooted in his biography marked by the trauma of World War II and the Holocaust. The works elucidate the artist’s persistent effort, with introspection and confronting tragic memories as his personal means of survival as he searched for his own place in the war-scarred world.
Having started with paintings and prints inspired by Holocaust photographs, he gradually moved to an authorial and universally humanist vision. Hence portraits and almost fantastical figures form the bulk of the drawing oeuvre presented to the National Museum in Wrocław.
There are also drawings related to paintings dating to later periods, for example The Hunchbacked series, book and press illustrations, and drawings documenting current events, first of all the 5th World Festival of Youth and Students organized in Warsaw in 1955. Many drawings showcase the artist’s unique way of defining shapes, figures, and settings which seem to emerge from the dense tangle of feverishly drafted lines or, alternatively, from patches of black against which figures and structures became visible like on developed film negative. Sometimes, he marks forms with strong albeit not necessarily thick contour.
Even when inspired by other artists, like Marc Chagall, Oberländer remains authentic, true to himself and original as attested not only by the gifted works but apparent across his oeuvre. This is perfectly exemplified by his signature Figures that were showcased at the exhibition presented by the National Museum in Wrocław in 2020: Jan Lebenstein, Marek Oberländer: Totemic Sign of the Human Figure.
Among the gifted works, there are also drawings from the series entitled Roots, hitherto unknown to the public. Simplified and removed from context, individual tree trunks, branches, and roots have been transformed into fascinating abstract forms, some defined with multiple short strokes, others with a single continuous line. These works mark the beginning of the artist’s interest in non-figurative art.
Featured at the present exhibition, the Eyes painting (1957) is one of Oberländer’s earliest experiments with Geometrical Abstraction. The artist used similar compositions as illustrations to articles on artistic and cultural topics.
A new chapter in Oberländer’s explorations of the abstract idiom opened after his arrival in France in 1963. Rich in spontaneous, dynamic compositions animated by intense colour, it presaged the art of his last years which he approached as a source of joy and form of therapy after multiple cardiac episodes.
Shortly before his death, in collaboration with Mariusz Hermansdorfer who at the time headed the Department of Contemporary Art, Oberländer selected some 200 pieces for his planned exhibition at the National Museum in Wrocław. Fulfilling her late husband’s wish, Halina Pfeffer-Oberländer presented them to the Museum in 1980. The same year, the exhibition was staged and its catalogue featured the artist’s autobiography written in late 1977 – early 1978.
Thus, the recent gift has continued and complemented the collection of Oberländer’s works at the National Museum in Wrocław: numbering about 680 pieces, it is now one of the biggest in Poland. All pieces by Marek Oberländer presented in 2022 may be viewed on the National Museum in Wrocław’s website (mnwr.pl; Digital Museum).
[Justyna Chojnacka, Magdalena Szafkowska; tłum. Małgorzata Możdżyńska-Nawotka]