Edward Dwurnik, Tulips, 2018,

From 1963 to 1970, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw at the Faculty of Painting and at the Faculty of Sculpture. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Cyprian Kamil Norwid Art Criticism Award (1981), the "Solidarity" Independent Culture Committee Award (1983), and the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award (1992).

Edward Dwurnik created elaborate series of paintings. He was an extremely prolific artist. About his work and combining paintings into series he said in an interview:

It's a problem of quantity, which requires professionalism at work. A daily grind leading to exhaustion.

His output included more than 3,500 paintings and 10,000 drawings. This is known because the artist kept a meticulous record of his own oeuvre. Miroslaw Ratajczak wrote:

Edward Dwurnik's work is a permanent working condition. It is true that it is possible to separate certain trends, cycles, periods, sets of works, moments of concentration on something particularly inspiring to the author at a given time, but the boundaries are fluid, conventional. There is an ongoing reevaluation of experiences, references, intellectual, aesthetic, moral categories. It can be said, with little risk, that the law of transition of quantity into quality rules here.

A funding artistic experience for Dwurnik was his encounter with the work of the self-taught artist Nikifor, whose works he saw in the summer of 1965 at an exhibition in Kielce. From the "Drawing No. 1" of June 13, 1965, made under the influence of that show, the artist dated his work. In a 1996 interview, he recalled:

[Nikifor] was my most important master, actually the only one. (...) To this day, whenever I go outdoors or paint with watercolors, I have that exhibition before my eyes.

From Nikifor Dwurnik took over blunt realism and grotesqueness, a kind of anti-aesthetic attitude. Already in the 1960s, his characteristic style was formed - the handling of drawn, hurried form and transformed "primitivism." In another place the artist told:

I had a problem after graduating from the Academy, actually already during my studies, because everyone painted more or less the same, drew the same (...). We had narrowed horizons and equally uninteresting perspectives. (...) And that's when Nikifor helped me. (...) I met him personally in 1966 or 1967, because he came to the Academy, actually they brought him in a gray Warsaw car. There was a caretaker with him. Nikifor got off, sat on a bench by us and started drawing. He drew and drew, and I watched. (...) It's a fact that I tried to paint a little like Nikifor at the time, but it was just a perverse momentum in my own direction. So it's more of a joke with this Nikifor of mine. Nevertheless, at the time he was very important to me, he showed me the way.

(quoted in Edward Dwurnik "A Short History of My Painting")

Dwurnik's trademark became, in particular, the "Hitchhiking Journeys" series, begun in 1966. It consists of cityscapes (vedutas), mostly without a horizon line - observed from a bird's eye view, with a characteristic accumulation of motifs. They usually depict specific Polish cities, but the artist did not remain faithful to topography or perspective. In the paintings of this series, objects and buildings that are actually many blocks away from each other may be adjacent to each other. Dwurnik's cities are populated by people and a whole set of artifacts. One of the more common ones are "idols" - monumental statues-heads symbolizing totalitarian power, the idea of which was formed in the summer of 1970. In "Hitchhiking Journeys"there is usually a lot going on, the canvases overwhelm with the accumulation of details and motifs. They combine features of documentary and symbolic painting, reflecting the atmosphere of Polish reality. But they are unfamiliar with a sense of humor, often found in the painter's work.

In 1970 Dwurnik defended his diploma thesis at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of Professor Eugeniusz Eibisch. It constituted the "Diploma" series. The following year, his debut exhibition was held at the Contemporary Gallery in Warsaw, run by Janusz Bogucki. At it, the artist presented early series of paintings: "Diploma", "Plaster Plein Air","Road", "Different Blues"and drawings. This exhibition was reported in "Współczesność" by Wojciech Skrodzki:

"A careful analysis makes it possible to distinguish two planes on which this drama of social man, written out into an infinite number of scenes, is played out: the universality of cruelty, the normality of evil, the blindness of intolerance and powerlessness - and the 'Promethean' theme: the few individuals in the face of the organized machine of violence," he wrote.

Skrodzki's description also fits well with Dwurnik's other series that he initiated in the 1970s, such as"Workers"(1975-1991) and "Sportsmen" (1972-1992). Especially the latter, published in 2011 in its entirety in the form of an album containing several hundred reproductions, secured Dwurnik's name as a painter of everyday life in communist Poland. The "Sportsmen" of the titleare, according to the artist, smokers of the then-popular cigarettes, "Sports", or simply champions in the discipline of elbow-pushing. Dwurnik created a catalog of communist-era human types - engineers, individual farmers, drunks.