Design for Street Sculptures

Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz was a leader of the contemporary visual artists in Adelaide in the 1950s, and worked as a stage designer, actor, producer, and teacher of drama. 

Design for Street Sculptures relates to Dutkiewicz’s work as a member of the City Decoration and Illumination Committee for Adelaide Festival of Arts. He was commissioned to do a series of sculptures for the median strip of King William Street for the 1966 and 1968 Festivals.

Many drawings of ideas for these designs are held in the Dutkiewicz Archive in the State Library of South Australia. Some of these were realised, including designs from 1966 and 1968.

Dutkiewicz came to Adelaide from a Displaced Persons' camp in Germany at the end of World War II. In Poland Dutkiewicz studied painting at the Kraków Academy and trained in drama and stage design at the Lwów Opera Theatre. He furthered his training in painting under scholarship at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

When he arrived in Australia his first job was working in the Adelaide Railway Station as a painter alongside another artist displaced by World War II, Czech artist, Alexander Sadlo who also became well-known in Australia for semi-abstract, geometric and colourful works.

From 1950, Dutkiewicz became recognised not only in Adelaide but also interstate. He exhibited regularly with other leading modern artists Arthur Boyd and John Brack and is celebrated for his semi-abstract portrait and landscape paintings that possessed a sense of energy, time and place.