Exhibition “*** TOWARDS FREEDOM” at the State Art Gallery in Sopot

Opening: July 29, 2021
Exhibition: July 30th – October 3rd, 2021
Curator: Bogusław Deptuła

“*** TOWARDS FREEDOM. Polish Art of the 1980s. and 1990s. from the Collection of Werner Jerke from Recklinghausen ”.

A fragment of one of the best collections of Polish art of the 20th and 21st centuries, from the collection of Werner Jerke, will be presented at the State Art Gallery in Sopot. Some of the exhibited works are legendary, they are known and reproduced, but hardly anyone knows who owns them.

Jerke collects with expertise and a sense of the specificity of Polish art. He knows perfectly well where he is beating. He chooses accurately and with sensitivity.

By profession Werner Jerke is an ophthalmologist, owner of an ophthalmology clinic and a winemaker. However, he is best known as a collector of Polish art and the founder of the first private museum of Polish art outside Poland. The museum is located in Recklinghausen (Ruhr District), Germany, in a building that was designed by a collector himself.

Born in Gliwice to a German family, Jerke left Poland at the age of 23. He started collecting art of Young Poland and the École de Paris. Currently, his collection consists of several hundred items. He focuses on the Polish avant-garde of inter-war and post-war modernity.

The exhibition at PGS in Sopot will mainly present paintings from the 1980s. The works of the members of the Warsaw Gruppa – Ryszard Grzyb, Paweł Kowalewski, Jarosław Modzelewski, Włodzimierz Pawlak, Marek Sobczyk, Roman Woźniak; Wrocław Luxus, Łódź Kaliska, Grupa Ładnie, or classics such as Edward Dwurnik or Leon Tarasewicz, and artists of the younger generation, such as Radek Szlaga.

The presentation, consisting of over 60 objects, is a selection of works with a politically or socially engaged character. It presents a slightly less known side of the collector’s hobbies of Werner Jerke.

One of the most famous paintings by Paweł Kowalewski – “I, Shot by the Indians” will also be shown at the exhibition. The canvas was painted in 1983 during the martial law period in Poland and is an ironic self-portrait of the artist.