Georg Johann Tribowski, Revolt of the Nails, 1986

Thin pen, paper, 21 x 30 cm signed p.d.: monogram JTG; signed dated and described on the reverse: 17/09/86 GEORG TRIBOWSKI - AUFSTAND DER N ÄGEL. - BEHANDELT/MIT MIX FIXATIU/05/04/95. AUS DEM CEKLLIS - "UMWELTSHUTZ" XI/2/124 RISSEN "DIE EROBERUNG"

provenance: private collection, Warsaw The work "Revolt of the Nails" presented at auction comes from the series "Environmental Protection". It was created on September 17, 1986, during the artist's stay at the Rehabilitation Hospital in Bad Segeberg. At that time he created several drawings depicting trees with nails hammered into them. The tree in this case here is both an allegory of suffering and a symbolic expression of the damage man is doing to nature. The problem of environmental pollution, so obvious today, was extremely important throughout Tribowski's work. Even then, scrap metal, littered beaches and oil-contaminated birds appeared very often in his drawings on paper and oil paintings.

Georg Johann Tribowski was born in 1935 to a German family in Gdynia (his mother was Austrian, his father a Kashubian), and spent his childhood and first school years in Poland. In 1947, the Tribowski family moved to Szczecin, where Johann graduated from an art high school and then "studied" painting and art history with Prof. Kusztelski. In 1964, the family moved to Hamburg, where they acquired the status of late displaced persons. The artist thus lived in Poland for 29 years, during which he laid the foundation for his artistic work. In 1977, he married Gertruda Bujok, a native of Cieszyn, Poland. He died in Hamburg in 2002.
A comprehensive German-Polish monograph on the artist by Dr. Friedrich Gross was published in 2006, in which the artist's work is analyzed in detail and in depth.
"What is fascinating about Georg Johann Tribowski's paintings lies in his independence, which sometimes borders on original self-will. His robust painting technique enables him to achieve the enormous range of expression described here, from visual reference to reality to non-representational objectlessness, from pain to utopia devoid of explicitness. In the non-objective-constructivist works of the last period of his oeuvre, an unparalleled poetic content was achieved thanks to the refinement of paint application and increasing precision. Far too soon death ended the artist's life and work," - Gross writes
Georg Johann Tribowski's drawings have been exhibited in galleries in New York, while his oil paintings have been shown at the Museum für das Fürstentum Lüneburg in Lüneburg, Cieszyn, Warsaw, Szczecin, Bydgoszcz, Gdynia and many other Polish cities.
Currently, the artist's works are in the collections of the National Museum in Wroclaw, the National Museum in Szczecin, the Leon Wyczółkowski District Museum in Bydgoszcz and the District Museum in Torun, as well as in private collections in Poland and abroad.