Jan Lebenstein, Untitled

watercolor, ink, paper, 29.5 x 21 cm signed p.d.: J. LebenStein

provenance: private collection, Lubin

Jan Lebenstein (1930, Brest - 1999, ) Graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1954 under Artur Nacht-Samborski. A year later he made his debut at the Warsaw Arsenal in the exhibition "Against War - Against Fascism." In 1959, he was awarded the Grand Prix at the First Biennale of the Young in Paris, where he delighted the public with his compositions of Axial Figures, which were Lebenstein's artistic response to the condition of a society degraded by war. After the Axial Figures series, the painter's canvases began to feature fantastic beasts, which were often strange hybrids of animals and humans. The artist's works are in the collections of the National Museums in Warsaw, Krakow and Poznan, as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Nationale d'Art Moderne in Paris, among others.

Lebenstein seems to nullify the spirit-matter dualism. It is as if the starting point for him is a new interpretation of some chant of the distant past. Elverio Maurizi, art critic