Janusz Tarabuła (1931), IMAGE, 1962

Own technique/plate, 41 x 90 cm
signed, dated and described on the back: JANUSZ TARABUŁA | "OBRAZ" | 1962; pencil inscription: J. TARABUŁA

Janusz Tarabuła is one of the most important representatives of matter painting in Poland. He belonged to the Nowa Huta Group, active between 1956 and 1961, whose members later became part of the Krakow Group. The featured painting was created at a time when matter painting in Poland reached its apogee. As Marta Tarabuła points out, the period 1958-1963 was the greatest flowering of this tendency in our country. At that time, this aesthetic was popularized even by the press: "[...] matter painting, after a period of initial experiments, spread so widely that even "Polska" - a popular magazine for the intelligentsia - encouraged (as of the end of 1962) maybe you, too, can see the charm of living matter?" (M. Tarabuła, Trial of Time, in Painting Matter 1958-1963: The Nowa Huta Group, Krakow 2000, pp. 7-8). In 1960 Janusz Tarabuła approximated his artistic concept: "[...] painting is the processing of matter, giving it a new meaning. Creating a specific painting matter. [...] Modern painting, rejecting literary and conceptual layers, brings out from under them the deepest layer, the very matter of the painting - hitherto undervalued, and here finds new means of expression." In 2000, the painter added: "It's not about making a painting pretty, nor about making it programmatically ugly. Aesthetics, like anti-aesthetics, was outside our circle of interest. It was about achieving expression. [...] Creativity moved into the realm of concepts." This was the Polish version of arte povera, Tarabula added, a version that was "provincial, ours, peculiar." "The real inspiration [...] became the reality around us: cracked and scratched plaster, rotten planks of suburban fences, Romanesque stones of old walls, dilapidated products of rural material culture, mud, dust, all those 'objects of lower rank', as Kantor called them" (artist's statement in Painting Matter 1958-1963..., op. cit., pp. 165-166).