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Born in 1927, he belonged to the Columbus generation, i.e. young people for whom World War II was a formative experience. For Andrzej Wróblewski, its outbreak marked the end of the world in which he grew up. The son of a rector of a Vilnius university and a graphic artist, a witness to his father's death during a Gestapo search, and a repatriate to Krakow, he experienced the horror of war in its full dimension before he came of age. Therefore, it is not surprising that when he decided to be a painter, neither the aestheticism of the colorists nor the focus on formal issues of the Lodz or Cracow avant-garde proposed means of artistic expression adequate to the scale of his and his peers' wartime experiences. Perhaps the search for meaning, for a foothold, and the fear of another war, fueled by communist propaganda, became factors influencing Wróblewski's political involvement.

For decades, the odium of Socialist Realism weighed over his work. It's time to start seeing his paintings in a broader context, for this is a work that vivisectively penetrates the most painful existential experiences of human beings of any era.