The Krakow display of the works by Egon Schiele was the artist’s first exhibition to have ever been organised in Poland. Alongside Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, Schiele was one of the most eminent Austrian painters of the beginning of the 20th century.

Arousing a number controversies among the bourgeoisie, Schiele tragically died of Spanish influenza when he was only twenty-eight years old. His works combine the decorativeness of Jugendstil with a post-expressionist manner of imagining.

Schiele was a peerless master of prints, while the line – often rapacious, nervous and, hence, an unmatched means of expressing a model’s emotional states – played the most significant role in his oeuvre which comprises suggestive portraits, landscapes and female nudes characterised by powerful eroticism.

Permeated with melancholy, tragedy and anxiety, the works of Schiele offer an unparalleled exemplification of a decadent and fin-de-siècle atmosphere of Vienna at the turn of the centuries.