The exhibition "The Dark Country" presents, for the first time in Spain, a carefully curated retrospective of the visual art of the Polish—and Jewish—writer and artist Bruno Schulz (Drohobycz, 1892–1942), one of the leading figures of the interwar avant-garde. The singular poetics of these works are repeatedly nourished by childhood memories and the dark, suffocating vision of his native Drohobycz: obsessions translated into a landscape of somber shops, mannequins, anonymous women, top-hatted walkers, and rabbis, which found expression not only in his literary work but also in drawings and prints of rare intensity and coherence. His is a universal and metaphysical world, with Symbolist roots, viewed through the eyes of a child, and which can be compared to those constructed by other eccentric Central Europeans, such as Alfred Kubin or Franz Kafka himself, both of whom the Polish artist greatly admired.

Thus, a wide selection of his plastic work is collected, such as that which makes up his famous The Idolater's Book or illustrates his narratives, with special attention to The Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Hourglass, in addition to abundant and detailed documentary material that allows us to understand Schulz's work both in the context of the European international scene of the early 20th century and in the narrower context of his native Poland, in which he engaged in direct dialogue with artists and writers of the stature of Witcacy, Witold Gombrowicz or Wojciech Weiss.

The essays by Monika Poliwka, Irena Kossowska, Lucasz Kossowski, Serge Fauchereau, and Sergio Sanz complete this approach from a historical and contextual perspective that doesn't shy away from engaging directly with the materiality of the work. The result is a nearly exhaustive look at a creative world whose unsettling and enigmatic power doesn't diminish with time.

Schulz-Klossowski dossier in Minerva magazine