Wojciech Zamecznik

Multidisciplinary and experimental, Wojciech Zamecznik made his mark on the postwar Polish art scene by playfully exploring the boundaries of photography. Rather than encapsulating a fixed moment, he treated the medium as a jumping-off point for creating innovative graphic forms. Opening with self-portraits and the poster design for the historic show “Family of Man,” the exhibition includes more than two hundred works that reveal the breadth of both his process and his output. His earliest photos unfurl across Europe: His wife, Halina, is seated among high-contrast stripes of light in Bulgaria in 1953; laundered linens hang ethereally like ghosts in Albania in 1955; a woman faces a nude statue as though the two silhouettes were in a standoff in Berlin in 1956.

Black-and-white classicism transitioned into striking signage. Zamecznik’s film posters from the late 1940s to late 1950s feature work by several Polish directors such as Jerzy Kawalerowicz, as well as Fritz Lang’s film noir The Woman in the Window (1944) and Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953). Zamecznik used images from production companies and played with scale and framing while entirely reimagining the color palette. His covers for Architektura magazine between 1956 and 1966 (a publication for which he also served as artistic director for several years) showcase bright backgrounds and clean lines. Photography pivoted from a medium for transcribing reality to a foundation upon which to layer vivid, imaginative graphics. The exhibition deconstructs Zamecznik’s hybrid methods by parsing the photos and paintings that grew into montages and superpositions, for commissions as diverse as a contemporary poetry festival (1967), a national public-awareness campaign in Poland (1960), and a circus (1963). His work became increasingly avant-garde, using stroboscopic light to convey sequences of movement. His use of frenetic motion powerfully evokes aural vibrations and rhythms—effective promotion for various music festivals. Zamecznik deployed visuals as a way of expressing the intangible, achieving new forms that stretched into abstraction or featured typographic punch. One of his later works was an anamorphically distorted poster featuring the word Pamiętamy (we remember) in red, a chilling homage to the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau.