Chopin Competition's Posters - Part III (1995-2021)

The poster for the 13th Competition, like that for the 7th edition, was designed by Rosław Szaybo. There are 30 years between them. In this design, the artist proposed something completely different – he used a photograph of a hand. A virtuoso’s splayed fingers, in a gesture of attack, are reaching the keys. 

The drama of the representation was emphasised by superimposed shards of light, which enhance the impression of movement and the expression that accompanies the playing.

The other poster accompanying this edition of the Competition was designed by Tomasz Szulecki, who approached his theme in a more synthetic manner. If we put all the Competition designs next to one another, we see how different they are and what different techniques they use – even those which were produced in the same year. 

The year 2000 again brought the motif of the pianist’s hands. In this instance too, the artist (for the third time!) is Rosław Szaybo. The hands are again expressive, and their movement is emphasised by streaks of light. This time, however, we do not see a keyboard, with the background consisting of a score. Those streaks of light are in whites and reds, and they correspond to the colours of the notation.

Also within their field, we see Chopin’s signature, above the highlighted Competition logo, which functioned up to 2005, when the event was organised by the Fryderyk Chopin Society (since 2010 it has been organised by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute). 

Szaybo’s techniques altered over the years. But his works were always dominated by graphic qualities making use of photography. The 60s were characterised by collage technique, the 70s by the creation of a suitable setting for the photographs, which he took himself. 

Following the minimalist representations and the expressive hands, we have the poster produced for the 15th Chopin Competition by Wiesław Grzegorczyk (b. 1965). This constitutes a complete volte-face from conceptual and synthetic posters. Grzegorczyk’s work is as pictorial as it gets. 

Wiesław Grzegorczyk, a graphic artist and associate professor of the Art Faculty of Rzeszów University, is also a trained doctor. He usually paints his poster designs in acrylics, paraphrasing old paintings or producing pastiches of centuries-old cultural heritage. His works are marked by a wealth of allegories, symbols, layers of content and cultural codes.

The 16th edition of the Competition was officially announced with a poster by Rafał Olbiński (b. 1943). This is another landscape poster in the Competition’s history, the difference this time being that it was treated in a synthetic, rather than pictorial, way. 

The convention of this work comes as no surprise, since it was produced by one of the most distinctive painters, graphic artists and poster designers working within the bounds of the surrealist, symbolist and metaphoric strands in painting.

Figurative surrealism – since that, in general terms, is what we might call the tendencies in Olbiński’s works – represents a continuation of Wiesław Grzegorczyk’s formally similar and atmospherically lyrical poster from the previous edition of the Competition. In Olbiński’s work, we see scattered pianos instead of trees (this is literally a musical landscape).

Over the horizon, a great balloon is lifted into the air by birds enclosed within it, as if in a cage. 

In his other Competition poster to enter official circulation, Olbiński again used the motif of pianos, but this time with wings. Apart from Olbiński, posters for this edition were also prepared by Rosław Szaybo.

In 2015 the official competition poster was again designed by Rosław Szaybo. Once more, he used the motif of hands set to play. This time he suspended them in a black space, without any musical attributes such as piano keys or a score. He multiplied them in a pair of flat, neon colours, but the first hands are entirely white, as if cut out of the background.

Szaybo was one of those graphic artists who were commissioned to produce posters a couple of years in advance. Yet this was his last poster for the Chopin Competition. He died in 2019, in Warsaw, leaving behind a wealth of musical designs: from record covers to posters for the Chopin Competition. He died in 2019, in Warsaw, leaving behind a wealth of musical designs: from record covers to posters for classical music festivals, jazz happenings and operas.

The contemporary arena of Polish poster design (since the regime change of 1989) is a forum for many generations of graphic artists: from the oldest, born before the war, to those who began their artistic work in the new millennium. Design trends intermingle, but apart from a number of converging strands, we cannot speak of a uniform school of poster art.

In 2019, as a result of a closed competition in which 13 artists were invited to take part, a poster designed by Studio Moonmadness (est. 2009) was selected to become the main visual identification of the 18th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition. The studio comprises two graphic artists from Poznań: Dagny and Daniel Szwed. 

On their poster, the image of an instrument emerges out of seemingly strewn elements, colouristically flat (incl. a keyboard, a piano leg and a music stand). This set of parts, combined with the typography (although this was not originally part of the Studio’s design, but only added later), is light in expression, but a recognisable sign of Chopin.

The jury of the poster competition justified its choice as follows: ‘The design proposed by Studio Moonmadness refers to the tradition of the Chopin poster and to the Polish school of poster design, so it forms an excellent bridge between the traditional and the contemporary’ (Fryderyk Chopin Institute, 2019).