Xawery Dunikowski

Polish sculptor, painter and teacher born in 1875 in Krakow. In 1886, he began studying at the Krakow School of Fine Arts under the tutelage of Alfred Daun and Konstanty Laszczka. He participated in the open-air paintings of Jan Stanisławski. From 1895 he exhibited his works at home and abroad. The crowning achievement of his academic career was the job of a sculpture professor at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw, but in 1910 he abandoned her due to a conflict with the university authorities, and in 1914 he went to Great Britain. After the outbreak of the Great War, he spent the seasons in Bayonno as a soldier of the Foreign Legion, and until 1922 he lived in Paris. After returning to Poland, he took the chair of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow.

He spent almost the entire world war (1940-1945) in the concentration camp in Oświęcim. After the occupation, he worked as a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, and then in Warsaw. From 1959 he took the chair at the Faculty of Sculpture and Architecture at the State College of Fine Arts in Wrocław.

He died in Warsaw in 1964.

Xawery Dunikowski is one of the greatest artists in Polish art history. His sculptures were strongly influenced by Przybyszewski's poetry, undertaking a rather pessimistic dialogue with the condition of man as a being torn apart by an internal existential conflict (sculptures from the series Man 1898–1905: Byt, Myśl, Tchnienie, Maternity, Yoke, Man and Woman). He was the creator of numerous portraits, characterized by a wealth of psychological expression. Among the formal means he used, we find expressionist, impressionist, naturalistic, as well as concise, cubist forms.

In the interwar period, one can notice tendencies in Dunikowski to combine a portrait and a monumental sculpture; one of the most famous works from this period is the group of Wawel Heads (1925–26).

After the war, Dunikowski combined sculpture and architecture and created monumental compositions of simple, sharply cut solids and smooth surfaces in which he entered human figures.