Ruler of This World

Adrian Nikiel

Bust of a Worker – a sculpture by Xawery Dunikowski of the Abdank coat of arms from 1948 – during the Wrocław Recovered Territories Exhibition was meant to symbolise, as the catalogue stated and as modern museum information still maintains, the real ruler of this land. However, today, as in the autumn of 2025 the work of art was once again put on public display in the Four Domes Pavilion, we may see that there is nothing imperious in the subject, and that every single detail contradicts communist propaganda.

Whom, then, are visitors contemplating? A hero? A king? A wise man? A conqueror? No. After entering the pavilion, we stand before a terribly shattered wreck of a man, a silent accusation of the slave system in which the basic tools of physical labour were shovels and wheelbarrows, and sometimes only bare hands. We see the curved figure, mangled arms torn in the factory’s bowels; higher still, sightless eyes and deep furrows in the face. No one cared for the man, as he meant nothing to those exploiting his misery. The skin is fractured, bearing the marks of mutilations suffered over there, in the freezing cold; the hair, meanwhile, takes the shape of an overseer’s fingers clutching the victim’s head. Today’s host of this land (only with irony may Ksawery Pruszyński’s words be quoted) was merely an anonymous, interchangeable addition to the machine and the plan. Bust of a Worker could equally well be named Bust of a Pauper.

The monument looms over visitors, yet such an object may be easily knocked down and smashed. It is detached from reality and has no roots—fragile, like totalitarian propaganda in collision with truth.

In search of the latter, we direct our eyes to Jaroslav Vonka’s sculptures, this time heading to the Main Building of the National Museum in Wrocław. What dignity and power we find in the small figure known as The Gardener or The Tree of Life. The sculpture was created over a dozen years before Dunikowski’s monument—yet everything differs between these works of art. Seemingly, they may be linked by a reference to physical activity, but even this association fails, for there is an abyss between the sanctifying meaning of human labour and utter futility. A dozen years—yet in fact a whole epoch (a spiritual formation)—separates the truly regal consciousness of the creator from labour to exhaustion, and responsibility for God’s work from utopia. One might also risk the presumption that The Gardener could come into existence only under conditions created by the introduction of the Feast of Christ the King into the liturgical calendar.

A proportional silhouette, individualized and noble facial expression, a bare torso, rolled-up trousers, a wounded side, and beside him the tree of life—a symbol well known from mythology and here Christianised. The figure titled The Gardener stands on a sphere, a symbol of the globe whose inhabitants Our Lord Jesus Christ redeemed and purchased as His own with His Most Precious Blood. And thus, two threads intertwine: the Redeemer and the redeemed, the sole salvific character and cooperation in the work of salvation (possibly certified by martyrdom, but certainly by everyday exertion, for without it the garden could not function). The sphere in this context is also a regal attribute, a foundation without which no garden could come into being.

Order against despair, cooperation against slavery, person against the “speaking tool,” life against usurpation.

Translated by: Bartosz Edward Koniewicz