acrylic, wood, fiberboard, 39 x 39 cm (68 x 68 cm framed) signed and dated on the reverse: H. Stażewski/1975
provenance: private collection, Warsaw; Olimpus Gallery, Lodz
exhibited: Henryk Stażewski. 1894-1988. on the centenary of his birth, Museum of Art in Lodz, 13.XII 1994 - 26. II 1995
Henryk Stażewski (1894, Warsaw - 1988, Warsaw) Henryk Stażewski studied at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts under Stanislaw Lentz. In 1923, he participated in Formist exhibitions and the Exhibition of New Art in Vilnius. He belonged to avant-garde groups: Blok, Praesens, a.r., Cercle et Carré, Abstraction-Création. He co-founded the international collection of modern art at the Museum of Art in Lodz. After the war, he was associated with the Crooked Circle Gallery in Warsaw. He was one of the initiators of the Foksal Gallery. He was one of the pioneers of the Polish avant-garde, a representative of Constructivism and the geometric abstraction trend. He participated in many foreign exhibitions, including: Centre Pompidou in Paris, Royal Academy in London, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Milan, Madrid, Rome or Zurich.
Abstract art (...) is the sum of impressions and observations, it is a sense of the climate of modernity, an expression of the dynamism of today's life, a lyrical image of the era in which upheavals caused by great social movements, inventions and discoveries, the era of the smashing of the atomic pile, etc., are taking place. All this is causing fundamental changes in the nature of our lives and must find resonance in art and create new means of artistic expression - Henryk Stażewski.
