Boguslaw Szwacz, WITHOUT TITLE, 1975

185.0 x 119.5cm - oil, canvas dated p.d.: 1975





♣ to the price auctioned, in addition to other costs, a fee will be added, resulting from the right of the artist and his heirs to receive remuneration in accordance with the Act of February 4, 1994 - on Copyright and Related Rights (droit de suite).





Boguslaw Szwacz (Leżajsk 27 III 1912 - Warsaw 24 II 2009) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, from which he graduated with honors in 1937. During his studies he served in the School of Reserve Cadets in the borderlands and took a study trip to Vienna. He survived the war years in Lviv, successively under Soviet and German occupation. In 1944, evacuated with the Germans to Krakow, he settled in Tyniec, where he created a series of landscape watercolors. After the war, he joined in organizing artistic life, and in 1946 took up teaching work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. In 1946 he exhibited with Kantor's Group of Young Visual Artists. In 1947/48 he went to Paris on a scholarship, where he joined the group "Le Surréalisme Révolutionnaire" and co-edited its bimonthly magazine. In 1948 he moved to Warsaw, where he joined the Club of Young Artists and Scientists. His period of activity in the post-war avant-garde movement closed with his participation in the First Exhibition of Modern Art in Krakow at the turn of 1948/49. From the end of 1949, he worked at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, and after its merger with the Academy of Fine Arts in 1950, he began a long teaching career at the academy, which lasted until his retirement in 1982. During the years of Socialist Realism, he participated in all the National Art Exhibitions (1950, 1951/52, 1952/53, 1954) and other official exhibitions. His solo exhibition in March 1955 was one of the first exhibitions of abstract art. At this time, the artist began to formulate his own theory of art, to which he remains faithful to this day. The concept of Ars-Horme (Art of Moving the Imagination) is concretized in paintings whose variations are defined by the terms ars-hormegram, ars-hormegraph and ars-hormegraph. These are compositions built from small forms, whose rhythms and densities on the plane are further accentuated by texture and color. The Ars-Horme theory also underpinned Szwacz's teaching method, who taught drawing at the Department of Sculpture since the 1960s. Since the late 1950s, the artist participated in many exhibitions of the avant-garde movement, including the Second and Third Exhibitions of Modern Art in Warsaw (1957 and 1959), "Confrontations" at the Krzywe Koło Gallery, Warsaw 1962 and 1963, the First Biennial of Spatial Forms in Elblag (1965), Golden Grape symposia in Zielona Gora (1973, 1976), plein-air events in Osieki (1964, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1984). In addition to painting and drawing, the artist was engaged in music (he played the violin), and since the 1980s also in poetry (he published a selection from several thousand sonnets in 1988 in two volumes).