signature p. d.: Lenica
signature in marker on reverse on canvas: A. LENICA | 1967 | WARSAW | PARIS | "ZATRWOŻONY PATRIACHA" [sic !]
Provenance: collection of the artist's family.
Alfred Lenica - a musician by training and a painter by vocation - finally formulated his highly original artistic statement in the early 1960s. The road to it led through nearly thirty years of experience and experimentation with painting material: from strong inspiration by the work of Picasso and surrealism in the spirit of Giorgio de Chirico, through the creation of the first Tascist painting in Polish art, to figuration in accordance with socialist realist doctrine and a return to abstraction. Presented in the catalog, the objectless composition belongs to the group of late and most critically acclaimed works, being the author's adaptation of surrealism and gesture painting. Placing emphasis on the role of chance, spontaneous recording of impressions and rejection of traditional tools were the starting point for the development of an innovative technique. Bozena Kowalska wrote about the artist's workshop in his mature period: He covered the canvas with several successive layers of paint of different colors from the lightest valor to the darkest. The last, top layer, was usually black. The artist also prepared peculiar "tools" made of cardboard or thick paper, with which he uncovered deeper or shallower layers of paint in a precisely calculated manner. In this way, extracted as if from the murky spatial depths, indefinite forms appear, luminous, saturated with color or metallic shiny. These are swirling strands, shapes similar to shells, jellyfish, metallic skeletons, or unlike anything known to the eye. They fill entire areas of the paintings with bustle and profusion, or, on rare occasions, appear sparingly, in moderation. Sometimes they are associated with human figures, but most often they are clusters of unidentified elements, giving only the viewer's imagination a variety of associative possibilities. All of these forms are charged with energy, dynamic movement of rapid expansion or flight in space, or the aggression of dramatic clashes. [...] The nature of these jumbled, illegible shapes is peculiar. On the one hand, they are characterized by the vitality of living organisms. At the same time, after all, they seem to be mechanisms constructed of hard and crippling, as if tin shapes. [B. Kowalska, Lenica - Artist of Many W ays [in:] Alfred Lenica. Painting, Arsenal City Gallery, Poznan 2002, pp. 25-26]
Achieved through a unique, proprietary formula - virtuosity of color combinations and harmony of forms, incredible expression and dynamics - are close to experiencing a musical piece. This analogy, often pointed out by the artist - a professional violinist - should not come as a surprise. What remains a unique phenomenon in the arena of art, however, is the measure of talent and determination of the late debuting artist, who is counted among the most outstanding Polish "classics of modernity."
♣ to the auctioned price, in addition to other costs, will be added a fee resulting from the right of the creator and his heirs to receive remuneration in accordance with the Act of February 4, 1994 - on Copyright and Related Rights (droit de suite)
Alfred Lenica (Pabianice 1899 - Warsaw 1977) studied drawing and painting privately in the studios of Artur Hannytkiewicz and Piotr Kubowicz in Poznań (1925-1928). In the 1930s he painted figurative paintings, referring in style to Cubism. A little later he succumbed to the influence of Surrealism, which, leaving aside the years of Socialist Realism, would become his most serious area of painterly exploration. Since the mid-1940s, he maintained regular contacts with the circle of the "Cracow Group" and was friends with Jerzy Kujawski. After moving to Poznan, in 1947 he became a co-founder of the avant-garde group "4F+R" (paint, form, fantasy, texture + realism). He is the author of the first Polish Tasist painting (Paints in Motion, 1949, tempera). During the period of Socialist Realism, he joined the mainstream of official art, working simultaneously as an organizer of artistic life, president of the Poznañ District of ZPAP (1948-1950) and at the same time head of the Studio of Visual Arts there. At the end of the 1950s, he moved to War-szawa and also here, until 1969, held managerial positions in ZPAP. In the second half of the 1950s, he again - after the experiments of the 1940s - practiced informel, painting eagerly using the dripping technique. Around 1958, he developed an individual, distinctive style of swirling, colorful, sometimes calligraphic forms that dynamically filled the fields of paintings. He created them using a technique akin to surrealist decalcomania. This style became the artist's trademark for the rest of his life. In his paintings he did not shy away from shapes referring to natural forms (his painting was called "biological"), and in the 1970s he sometimes included figural motifs in his compositions. The artist's retrospective exhibition was held at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw in 1974.
