‘The exhibition at the Willa Lentza is a retrospective one, albeit the “retro-” part of this term may not be quite appropriate for the most recent works presented here. Nor is the label “archival posters” quite suitable since they have (unfortunately) lost nothing of their topicality despite the passage of several dozen years. “Unfortunately” because these posters testify to the unreflective character of the world’s contemporary rulers. In today’s digital reality, such unreflective thoughts and ideas frequently enter the world wide web, functioning as a kind of unerasable tattoos, products of bad taste. The works shown at this exhibition are like a reading or printout of monitoring test results from my observations of the world. They have been designed as free from censorship, whether my own or any other, and from any form of dictatorship.’ Lex Drewinski
Born on 11th September 1951 in Szczecin, Professor Lex Drewinski, DocFA, Habil., is one of the world’s most recognisable poster artists. His minimalist, intelligent, and keen artistic statements, typically devoid of unnecessary colouring or lettering, are so many warning signs placed wherever the road of our life proves to be meandering, bumpy, or a dead end. Drewinski’s works have been awarded more than 200 times, mostly at international poster competitions in Poland and worldwide. They have been presented at more than seventy individual and collective exhibitions, including in Athens, Amman, Beijing, Beirut, Berlin, Damascus, London, Madrid, Mexico City, Nicosia, Odense, Quito (Ecuador), Stockholm, Thessaloniki, and Warsaw.
From the mid-1980s onwards, Drewinski has participated in nearly all the major poster exhibitions and presentations worldwide. His works can be found in the collections of the world’s most important poster art institutions, such as the Zurich Museum of Design (Museum für Gestaltung), the Brandenburg State Museum of Modern Art (BLMK) at the Dieselkraftwerk Cottbus, the National Museum in Poznań, the Museum of Caricature and the Poster Museum at Wilanów (both in Warsaw), Museum Folkwang, the German Poster Museum and Poster Centre (all in Essen), Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center in Moscow, the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles, the Nihon Kokusai Poster Museum in Ogaki, the Mönchehaus Museum in Goslar, the House of Humour and Satire in Gabrovo, the State Museum at Majdanek in Lublin, the Memorial Museum in Mons, the House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the House of European History in Brussels, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
