Zdzislaw Beksinski, Relief, 1957

60.0 x 88.0 cm - plastic pulp, panel pilsn. signed on the back l.g.: ZDZISŁAW | BEKSIŃSKI | 1957

lower: PROPERTY | MARK PIASECKI | [owner's address in Cracow].



Reproduced image:

- Zdzislaw Beksinski Art Promotion Archive website (https://www.beksinskiarchiwum.net/archiwum1,prace_artystyczne_beksinskiego_skany,reliefy_i_rzezby.html).



Zdzislaw Beksinski, who is primarily associated with figurative painting, depicting unreal visions from the borderline of java and dream, began with abstract art, which brought him recognition from art critics. Beksinski experimented with avant-garde compositions in photography, and in the second half of the 1950s created paintings-reliefs. In his phonograph diary, in April 1958, he left his own commentary on this: Now I keep making structural paintings, various stories flooded with varnish, burned (...). We'll see what comes of it when I look back on it next year. In Beksinski's biography, Magdalena Grzebałkowska included a memoir by Jacek Rudak: He would glue various pieces of plaster onto the chipboard, mold it properly, and then paint it all. After painting, he would put on as many more layers of paint, and then rub it off with solvent. He rubbed until he reached the color he wanted.

In 1958 Beksinski was already showing his reliefs at the headquarters of the Association of Polish Architects in Poznan and in September 1959 the reliefs were shown at - organized by Marian Bogusz - the Third Exhibition of Modern Art. Beksinski's works delighted then art critic Jacek Woźniakowski, who wrote after the exhibition: The matter of one Beksinski painting gives the impression of noble, old, extinguished ceramics, but I was particularly attracted to the second painting: a rectangle of almost black, matte wood eaten away by woodworm - slightly iridescent in places, which again resembles the velvety surface of a charred, cracked slab. But one could also compare this modulation of tiny, almost geometric strings to some burnt-out city, seen from a great distance. The comparisons are quite indifferent here, because Beksinski's work works not so much through such allusions as through their sum, or rather through the aura in which they are born: it has the delicate and ever-changing regularity of nature's works, the simplicity and sophistication of things whose face has been slowly hollowed out by time, destroying their original shape, but at the same time giving them an abiding that is more resilient or perhaps tragically frowned upon. (Magdalena Grzebałkowska, Beksińscy. Portret podwójny, Kraków 2014, pp. 67-68)

As the dedication on the back indicates, the relief belonged to photographer Marek Piasecki (1935-2011), a friend of Beksinski's. The artists corresponded extensively and met in Sanok.

The offered relief is extremely rare on the art market. Compared to Beksinski's extensive painting output, a relatively small number of reliefs were created and almost all of them are in museum collections, mainly in the Historical Museum in Sanok and the National Museum in Wroclaw.





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

Zdzislaw Beksinski (Sanok 24 II 1929 - Warsaw 21 II 2005) studied from 1947 to 1952 at the Faculty of Architecture of the Cracow University of Technology. He was a self-taught artist who achieved an unquestioned position in Polish contemporary art, confirmed by the presence of his works in prestigious exhibitions and museum collections. He was initially involved in photography, which he had been interested in since his student years, after 1956 gaining recognition as a creator of photograms with an aesthetic based on textural effects. In 1958-1962, he created abstract paintings-reliefs of rich texture, mainly metal, which are a variation of matter painting. Toward the end of this period, he created openwork forms with figure shapes and full-bodied sculptures in metal. The next stage of his work was 1962-1974, when he devoted himself mainly to drawing. In the 1960s he drew with pen and ink figural compositions characterized by caricatured deformation of figures. From the late 1960s, he created charcoal and crayon drawings, a monochromatic variant of his parallel painting work. Since 1974, he has dealt almost indivisibly with painting. His distinctive style was based on technical perfection, accompanied by an extraordinary vision. He painted a post-disaster world, marked by the stigma of death and decay. His paintings are populated by figures and creatures with admittedly human or animal shapes, but with the characteristics of phantoms, automatons or decaying corpses. The artist did not give his paintings and drawings titles (except for ordering symbols), thus emphasizing his lack of interest in the literary side of the depictions. He himself said that when painting he completely surrenders to the vision, "photographing" it. In recent years, he has incorporated electronic image generation techniques into his artistic technique, which he used to create computer photomontages. Beksinski's art, which has been exhibited and discussed many times, arouses extreme emotions among experts and the public.
The largest, systematically replenished collection of his works in the country is in the Historical Museum in Sanok, abroad - in Paris, in the possession of Piotr Dmochowski, who has been collecting works and promoting the artist's work since 1983. He organized individual exhibitions of Beksinski's works at, among others, Galerie Valmay in Paris in 1985, 1986 and 1988, as well as a permanent exhibition at Dmochowski's own Galerie - Musée-galerie de Beksinski, which existed from 1989 to 1996. He also published monumental albums of the artist in 1988 and 1991.
In Poland, Beksinski's monograph by Tadeusz Nyczek was published by Arkady in 1989 (second edition in 1992). In the spring of 2005, a large exhibition of Beksinski's paintings took place at the Abbotsford Palace in Gdansk Oliva, and the director of the Sanok Museum Wieslaw Banach published a comprehensive monograph on the artist.

Since October 2016, an exhibition of 250 works (paintings, drawings, photographs) by Zdzislaw Beksinski from the private collection of Anna and Piotr Dmochowski has become a permanent fixture at the Nowa Huta Cultural Center. Meanwhile, a permanent exhibition of 30 Beksinski paintings from the Dmochowskis' collection has also been on display at the Archdiocese Museum in Warsaw since June 2021.

(Photo: Piotr Dmochowski, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8960820 )