Vintage Polish Posters | The Removalists | Andrzej Klimowski

Playwright David Williamson was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1942. Williamson first turned to writing and performing in plays in 1967 and rose to prominence in the early 1970s, with works such as “Don´s Party“ (later turned into a 1976 film) and “The Removalists” in 1971. He also collaborated on the screenplays for  “Gallipoli“ (1981) and “The Year of Living Dangerously” (1982). The subject of this poster, “The Removalists”, addresses the main issues of domestic violence, male aggression and the abuse of power and authority. The story is supposed to be a microcosm of 1970s Australian society. Regarding the poster displayed here, artist Andrzej Klimowski was born in the UK of Polish emigre parents. He later made his way to Poland where he rapidly built a career for himself as one of the leading young Polish poster artists of the 1970s. He met and was influenced by the great Polish poster artists Roman Cieslewicz and Henryk Tomaszewski. It was the theater poster that was to provide Klimowski with his ideal canvas. Klimowski said “Films have their own visual look and iconography, which is part of the director’s vision. You could find a metaphor for something, a symbol which has nothing to do with any image from the film, but on the whole you had to adhere to that vision, or so I thought. With the theater, all you were given was the manuscript, or the published play, and it didn’t matter what the director was going to do with it because the poster would be printed way ahead of rehearsals. So you could give your own interpretation.”