Waldemar FYDRYCH [MAJOR] (b. 1953), Yellow Dwarf from Madalinskiy, 1982/2017

Waldemar "Major" Fydrych is a famous Polish happening artist and painter known for his images of distinctive dwarfs, which he began creating as early as 1982. Initially, the artist painted them during martial law on the walls of Polish cities on stains created after the regime painted over opposition slogans. The graffiti of the dwarfs (more than a thousand in all) resonated with society and power circles, eventually leading the artist to create a legendary art and opposition movement with roots in Dadaism and Surrealism known as the Orange Alternative, which involved tens of thousands of people, sometimes clad in dwarf hats. The ideological basis of the movement was the Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism, published by Major in the spring of 1981, combined with the concept, subsequently developed by the artist, of "dialectical synthesis art," according to which the anti-regime slogan was the thesis, the stain covering it, the antithesis, and his graffiti of the dwarf was the synthesis. Since, according to Hegelian dialectics, quantity transforms into quality, the artist postulated that "the more dwarfs, the better."