Marek Włodarski worked as a painter, draughtsman, and educator, and is known for co-founding the avant-garde group Artes. His intimate, lyrical and radically anti-aesthetic work was formally influenced by the paintings of Fernand Léger and French Surrealism, while conceptually addressing the complex identity of Polish culture. Włodarski played an important role in working with the artistic phenomena that were of crucial significance to Central and Eastern Europe before, during, and after the Second World War. Marek Włodarski’s works have been part of many exhibitions and collections in Poland and abroad, such as Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy; Art Pavilion, Berlin, Germany; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland; National Museum, Warsaw, Poland; Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland; Museum of Art, Łódź; Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Poland; Galerie Au Sacre du Printemps, Paris; TPSP, Lviv; Jabłkowskich House, Warsaw; Musée Beaux Arts, Alexandria, Egypt; Silesian Museum, Wrocław, Poland; National Museum, Poznań, Poland, and many others. 

In his later paintings and in the work Obraz 15, Włodarski develops his formal investigations of figures through the simplification of the oil painting’s forms by painting over certain details. Through this process, he created tension between the subject matter and his own visual language, since a bright but fragmented part of the painting captures a sense of simultaneity that moves towards sheer abstraction. Aside from being a prominent artistic figure, Włodarski should also be understood as a figure of resistance against an extremely uniformed vision of Polish society and culture. His work often addressed the complexity of identity in the cultural melting pot of his home city of Lwów, with its Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian population, directing attention onto experiences of deprivation during the war, as well as onto artefacts originating from the camps.