collage, canvas, 59 x 45 cm signed p.d.: 'Stern 977', on the back a sticker with a handwritten description of the painting and an exhibition sticker from the Nicolaus Copernicus Museum in Frombork with a description of the painting and the date VIII - IX 1977
EXHIBITED:
- individual exhibition, Nicolaus Copernicus Museum in Frombork, August - September 1977
- individual exhibition, Zapiecek Gallery, Warsaw 19 II - 10 III 1979
LITERATURE:
- Jonasz Stern. Paintings from 1964 - 1988, District Museum in Nowy Sącz [exhibition catalog], ed. Józef Chrobak, Nowy Sącz 1988, item 30.
ORIGIN:
- private collection, Sweden (purchased at an exhibition at the Zapiecek Gallery in 1979)
Of his many materials, Stern chose bones not by accident. He often arranges them in fine relief reminiscent of archaic Hebrew letters; however, not to create another midrash instructing on biblical transcendence. For in Stern's paintings, bones are first and foremost the vestigial forms left behind by living organisms - they explain decay and rebirth in the biological processes of ever-changing matter. Bones are also the most reduced form of what was alive.
Painter, printmaker and educator of Jewish descent. Initially, he took painting lessons
at a private school in Lvov and in Cracow with Ludwika Mehofferowa, then continued his
his studies at the local Academy of Fine Arts. He was a co-founder of the so-called First
Krakow Group, while after the war he was twice president of the Second Krakow Group. The work of
of the artist was strongly shaped by politics and wartime experiences, and did not take over from his teachers
from his student teachers - Fryderyk Pautsch, Teodor Axentowicz and Władysław Jarocki
- artistic formula, he was closer to the restless spirit of the avant-garde. The artist's oeuvre
can be divided into two main chapters: the pre-war period, in which there was a clear
influence of German Expressionism and Cubism, and the postwar period, which abounded in formal
experiments (matter painting, "biological abstraction"), where the key role was played by the
combining traditional mediums with unusual ones, such as organic remains of animals, while everything
was encircled with a net of symbolic meanings with a vanitative meaning.
