Andrzej Wróblewski is widely considered the most important Polish artist of the post-war period. He was born in 1927 and started to make independent work in 1948 while still an art student. Ideologically he leaned towards a socialist agenda and refuted contemporary movements in Poland devoted to international modernism. His signature works from that time are a number of paintings evoking an execution that are based on his wartime experiences. In 1950 Wróblewski gave up his previous way of painting and accepted the exigencies of Socialist Realism. After Stalin’s death and in the context of the “thaw” in Poland, deeply disappointed by the apparent failure of the communist model, he abandoned the socialist-realist doctrine in 1955 and reconnected to his 1948/49 work.

In his Execution pictures Wróblewski assumed the position of the “powerless witness” who exposed himself as being guilty of having been neither able to prevent the destruction of human life nor to give appropriate testimony of this destruction. This position was expressed through a generic figure type, wrongly assembled bodies, and heads and feet that were cropped off by the edges of the painting. Depicting from 1955 to 1957 a bus or tram driver directing his vehicle towards a nondescript landscape ahead, a segmented or flayed body, portraits carrying disquieting touches of colour, or an organless person traversed by slits that are sometimes identified as wounds, Wróblewski turned lines and edges that had been severing bodies in his earlier paintings into cuts and lesions slicing up the picture plane itself and thereby negating the very possibility of depiction.