Dimensions: 53 x 64 cm (light frame)
Signed and dated p.d.: 'Stern | 1970'.
Origins
Desa Unicum, 2019
private collection, Poland
Biography
He studied privately with P. Gajewski, then, in the late 1920s in Cracow - at the Free School of Painting and Drawing of L. Mehofferowa and at the Academy of Fine Arts with W. Jarocki, F. Pautsch, T. Axentowicz and S. Kamocki. During World War II he lived in the Lviv ghetto. He was active in the underground, escaped from a transport to the Belzec death camp, and avoided mass execution. In 1945, he returned to Krakow and joined the community centered around Tadeusz Kantor. He was active in the Krakow Group, which was renewed after the war (he was one of its pre-war founders). Throughout the 1950s and 1970s, he taught painting at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts. Since 1958, he was involved in collages, to which he added fish skeletons and small bones, as well as pieces of fabric; in this way he directed the viewers' attention to the themes most important to man - death and transience.
