Zbigniew Dowgiałło and Anna Gruszczyńska were the creators of a new direction in art - Futuro Baroque.

The theoretician of the field was the historian of philosophy Krzysztof Dowgiałło.

They announced their program in the spring of 1987 during a joint exhibition at the Promotional Gallery. The paintings they showed were completely different from what they had painted and presented at other exhibitions. Art critic Maryla Sitkowska recalls that "the most outstanding painting showed an abstract thicket of neither pipes nor lianas: technology intricately intertwined with biology in an inseparable thick tissue." He adds: "At that time, when young people's paintings were expected to express political overtones, and Dowgiałło was expected to make further pastiches of art found in museums - this exhibition and painting were ignored." During the opening

a manifesto was announced promoting a new art - Evolutionary Art - formulated in seventeen paragraphs. It started with merciless criticism of the status quo.

 

The source of decadence and decline was seen in the collapse of the entire artistic world. “Rational integration at a higher level” was indicated as the only solution. The following paragraphs read:

 

“The world is in uniformly delayed, apathetic motion, carried by the inertia of previous years, without purpose, without sense, and it is similar with today's art. It is time to interrupt this delayed movement, change its course and set the world in motion faster than the speed of light. “The era of a new form is coming and its shape will not consist of the epigonic garbage of recent art. Apologists must die out and perish in the burning fire of the art of evolution.” "The art of evolution leads to the 21st century." This manifesto was titled The First Program of the First Evolutionary Academy of Global Art. Even though Dowgiałło himself does not see it, this program was a utopia in the full sense of the word. In essence, every utopia is a dichotomous vision of the world, polarized between what exists and what should be. Visions of perfectly arranged worlds always require their sharp contrast with the existing order. It should be emphasized that the young artists did not want to escape from the uncomfortable dimensions of the world, but to give it a new shape. It was therefore not an escapist utopia that could be perfectly justified by the impending fin-de-siecle, but rather a heroic utopia of mass reconstruction.

At the time, this program was truly unique because postmodernism, which denied the idea of linear progress, also pushed aside any sense of utopia. It was the avant-garde that was utopian in its program. After its crisis, holistic systems for the revival of art and the world appeared extremely rarely.

The new program was to be implemented by the First Evolutionary Academy of Global Art, established in March 1987, with headquarters in Warsaw and branches in Gdańsk, Geneva, Milan, Munich, New York, Los Angeles and Rotterdam.

  A year later, the artists created a second manifesto accompanying the Evolutionary Architecture exhibition at SARP.

 

At both presentations, Zbigniew Dowgiałło showed works with a strongly geometric, energizing form, programmatically moving away from "subjectivity, expression, emotionality, instinct, literary touch" in favor of "rationalism, consciousness, dynamism, evolution". These paintings, with very eloquent titles, built the topography of a new utopia - an ideal place that does not exist, but which is worth striving for.

  Futuro-House, City I [City I], City II [City II], Light in the City, Luminous Penetration, Futuro-Space City.

 

The key concept of evolution, understood as constant growth and differentiation, stimulated the search for new quality. The artist's inventiveness suggested to him the shapes of a higher-order synthesis, which on the formal level was associated with a certain biological-cosmic futurism. The introduction to the evolution of spirit was to be biological and technical evolution, accelerated by the dizzying pace of technological development.