Dimensions: 117 x 80 cm
Origins
collection of Grazyna Kulczyk
Biography
Displaced from Greater Poland during the war, he lived alternately in Warsaw and Krakow. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. After the war, he settled in Paris. He established contacts with the Parisian avant-garde and above all André Breton. In 1947, he exhibited at the famous international Surrealism exhibition at the Maeght Gallery in Paris. From the end of 1949 until the second half of the 1950s, Kujawski was a creator of gestural abstraction and painted paintings in which he challenged the principles of figural composition, emphasizing chance, automatism, free arrangement of shapes and colors, and uncontrolled expression. In 1957, he had his first solo exhibition in Poland at the Krzywe Koło in Warsaw, where he showed a whole series of informel paintings. The beginning of the 1960s in Kujawski's art saw an interest primarily in matter painting. In the second half of the 1960s, he abandoned abstraction and again referred to figural imagery, but filtered through the iconosphere of the media world. He was inspired by his contemporary surroundings and clichés taken from mass culture. Increasingly, he turned to monotype, decal and serigraphy and so to the image-building techniques used by pop culture artists. This type of art in various variants, close to the art of the end of the century, would dominate until his last works of the 1990s.
