MOC TOPOR with a foreword by Jan Gondowicz, L&L Publishing House, Gdansk 2001, pp. 85, 30x22.5cm
The album was published on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition of Roland Topor's works, which was brought to Poland in 2001.
Publisher's binding, cardboard with wings
Roland Topor (born January 7, 1938 in Paris, died April 16, 1997 there) is a French writer of Polish origin, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, theater and film director, actor, screenwriter and set designer. Topor was born in Paris, where his parents, Polish Jews, emigrated to before World War II. He was the son of Abram Jechiel Topor (1903-1992), a well-known sculptor and graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and Zlata (née Binsztok). He spent his early years in Paris and then in Savoy, where during the war his family was sheltered from National Socialist persecution after Germany occupied France. He graduated from Paris' École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in 1964. As early as his student years, he collaborated with the satirical magazine "Hara-Kiri," which published, among other things, his drawings. He was also a co-founder (with Fernando Arrabal and Alejandro Jodorowsky) and member of the so-called "Panic Group" (1962).
Topor was the author of numerous book illustrations and posters. He collaborated with film. At the request of Federico Fellini, he prepared the design of a magic lantern - an important link in the set design of his film Casanova (1976)[1]. Roman Polanski's film The Tenant (1976), in which Topor himself played a minor role, was based on his novel The Chimeric Tenant. He also appeared in Werner Herzog's 1979 film Nosferatu the Vampire, among others.
Topor's work, inspired by Surrealism (the artist knew the movement's theorist André Breton personally), is full of shocking grotesque and black humor. Also characteristic of Topor's style is the use of elements of pure nonsense and playing with conventions and linguistic material. Versatile individuality, baroque imagination and breadth of creative activities bring Topor closer to the idea of synthesis of arts. On the thematic level, his work is mainly concerned with mocking the attitudes and mentality of the petit bourgeoisie, and also takes up existential themes, showing the individual in the midst of an alien world as if from a nightmarish dream.
