Roman Artymowski, UPAŁ I, 1977

81,0 x 60,0 cm - acrylic, canvas signed on the reverse on the canvas l.g.: ROMAN ARTYMOWSKI | UPAŁ I, 1977 | 82 x 64 cm, ACRYL

On the middle strip a stamp: GALERIA SZTUKI WSPÓŁCZCZESNEJ W WARSZAWIE, on the left strip an affixed sticker: "Sztuka Polska" with details of the painting.

Roman Artymowski in the 1970s worked as a lecturer in Damascus, Baghdad and Asilah, Morocco. The fruits of his travels to the Middle East were sophisticatedly colored canvases and watercolors, in which Artymowski was able to masterfully capture the essence of the local landscape - the heat pouring from the sky and the air shivering from the heat. The painting presented in the catalog is a great example of the artist's constantly reworking of the motif of a spherical sun suspended low over the horizon.

The artist calls them "suns." Because they are also transformations of a landscape, often a desert landscape. But the extreme simplification of its form to a sphere, its background and the horizontal stripes of interpenetrating colors below it, but the return to chromatic colors and reducing them to uniformity, to aggressive juxtapositions, sometimes on the verge of asceticism, but also a certain monumentalism of these visions make one no longer read these earthly landscapes, but perhaps cosmic landscapes? [...] For one perceives these suns sometimes as a luminous and joyful light, and sometimes as threatening and disturbing; soothing and hushed or burning and destructive; there are those that inspire hope, and those that take away all hope. And finally, there are the most precious, metaphysical ones: the suns that hide the eternal mystery of being and infinity. (quoted in B. Kowalska, Roman Artymowski. Selected Works, National Museum in Warsaw, 1998)

♣ to the auctioned price, in addition to other costs, a fee will be added, resulting from the right of the artist and his heirs to receive remuneration in accordance with the Act of February 4, 1994 - on Copyright and Related Rights (droit de suite)

Roman Artymowski (Lvov 1919 - Lowicz 1993) studied in 1945-49 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, receiving his diploma from Eugeniusz Eibisch. In 1950 he began teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 1953-56, together with his wife Zofia, he worked on the polychromy of the reconstructed tenements of the Old and New Town, for which he received the Second Degree State Award (team) in 1953. At the same time, in 1953-59, he was graphic editor of the Art Review. He then taught at art colleges in Baghdad. Upon his return, he took up teaching work as a docent at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz (1969-75), and was the rector of the school from 1971-75. From 1975 he again taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, became a professor in 1982, and served as rector from 1982-84. Artymowski from the mid-1950s created abstract or borderline compositions . In his paintings, especially watercolor, he sometimes used a freely spilled stain, which brings his early work closer to informel abstraction. In the 1960s and 1970s, he disciplined his form, limiting himself to various color solutions.