Zdzislaw Beksinski, DO, 1986

92,0 x 88,0cm - oil, fiberboard signed on the back: DO | BEKSIŃSKI

m.g. in black crayon: DO, l.d. export stamp



Provenance:

- The painting was purchased in 1990 in Paris for the Museum of European Art in Osaka, Japan.

- After the museum closed, a private collection in Asia.



Image exhibited, reproduced and described:

- Beksinski. Photographies. Dessins. Sculptures. Peintures, Anna et Piotr Dmochowski API, "Galerie DMOCHOWSKI-musee-galerie de Beksinski", Paris 1988/89, p. 208, il. 265;

- T. Nyczek, Zdzisław Beksiński, Warsaw 1989, p. 131, il. 78;

- Beksinski. Paris-Osaka-Warsaw, Agra-Art Gallery, Warsaw 1 July-4 September 2021, cat. no. 21, p. nlb. color ill;

- Japanese Collection. Beksinski and others, Agra-Art, Warsaw 2021, p. 53, color ill;

- Beksinski in Silesia, Tichauer Art Gallery, Tychy 18 June - 25 September 2022, p. 61, color ill;

- Dmochowski Gallery NET (Virtual Museum) website.



Zdzislaw Beksinski, known for paying great attention to workshop issues, used to work out the same subject several times in a chosen color approach. One of the most popular were - maintained in a muted range of browns and grays - anthropomorphic constructions built from an imaginary skeletal and mechanical system. These compositions were characterized by striking dynamism, achieved by multiplying the human figure, visible primarily in the parts of the hands and feet. The group of these unusual representations included the version of the so-called "bone chair" presented in this catalog, a motif known from several other paintings belonging to the Japanese collection (see, among others, Untitled, 1988, item 138 from the March 20, 2022 auction). Sitting on a bench, the humanoid creature performs a series of actions and gestures that evoke associations with violence, disability and decay. The macabre aesthetics, appalling in the first impression, recede into the background in the face of the virtuosity of depicting the pseudo-anatomical structures of the multi-membered organism. The surprising "credibility" of the depicted anatomy - considered a great asset of the Master of Sanok's paintings - intrigued the promoter of his work, art dealer Piotr Dmochowski. In a letter dated October 1984, "Beks" explained to the collector: The anatomy in my paintings is completely fantastic, but fantastic in such a way as to make it seem on the surface that everything is OK. I simply play with anatomy as much as I play with clouds, the sea, landscape or architecture; it's always something improbable in the sense of a realistic view [...] Of course, I don't see anything unorthodox in normal anatomy and its application, but variations on the theme of anatomy with a far deviation from realism seem to me more creative and, above all, less boring when working on them.

The intricate tangle of sinews and bones seen in DO is not only a surreal variation on the human body, but also an illustration of a new stage in the work of the "vision photographer," who in the second half of the 1980s began to move away from the style developed in the fantasy period (1968-1984). The human silhouette - deliberately processed and deformed - ceased to function as the ghostly protagonist of the "theater of horror," taking on increasingly synthetic forms that required craftsmanship.





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





(Sanok 24 II 1929 - Warsaw 21 II 2005) studied from 1947 to 1952 at the Faculty of Architecture of the Cracow University of Technology.

He was a self-taught artist who achieved an unquestioned position in Polish contemporary art, confirmed by the presence of his works in prestigious exhibitions and museum collections. He was initially involved in photography, which he had been interested in since his student years, after 1956 gaining recognition as a creator of photograms with an aesthetic based on textural effects. In 1958-1962, he created abstract paintings-reliefs of rich texture, mainly metal, which are a variation of matter painting. Toward the end of this period, he created openwork forms with figure shapes and full-bodied sculptures in metal. The next stage of his work was 1962-1974, when he devoted himself mainly to drawing. In the 1960s he drew with pen and ink figural compositions characterized by caricatured deformation of figures. From the late 1960s, he created charcoal and crayon drawings, a monochromatic variant of his parallel painting work. Since 1974, he has dealt almost indivisibly with painting. His distinctive style was based on technical perfection, accompanied by an extraordinary vision. He painted a post-disaster world, marked by the stigma of death and decay. His paintings are populated by figures and creatures with admittedly human or animal shapes, but with the characteristics of phantoms, automatons or decaying corpses. The artist did not give his paintings and drawings titles (except for ordering symbols), thus emphasizing his lack of interest in the literary side of the depictions. He himself said that when painting he completely surrenders to the vision, "photographing" it. In recent years, he has incorporated electronic image generation techniques into his artistic technique, which he used to create computer photomontages. Beksinski's art, which has been exhibited and discussed many times, arouses extreme emotions among experts and the public.
The largest, systematically replenished collection of his works in the country is in the Historical Museum in Sanok, abroad - in Paris, in the possession of Piotr Dmochowski, who has been collecting works and promoting the artist's work since 1983. He organized individual exhibitions of Beksinski's works at, among others, Galerie Valmay in Paris in 1985, 1986 and 1988, as well as a permanent exhibition at Dmochowski's own Galerie - Musée-galerie de Beksinski, which existed from 1989 to 1996. He also published monumental albums of the artist in 1988 and 1991.
In Poland, Beksinski's monograph by Tadeusz Nyczek was published by Arkady in 1989 (second edition in 1992). In the spring of 2005, a large exhibition of Beksinski's paintings took place at the Abbotsford Palace in Gdansk Oliva, and the director of the Sanok Museum Wieslaw Banach published a comprehensive monograph on the artist.

Since October 2016, an exhibition of 250 works (paintings, drawings, photographs) by Zdzislaw Beksinski from the private collection of Anna and Piotr Dmochowski has become a permanent fixture at the Nowa Huta Cultural Center. Meanwhile, a permanent exhibition of 30 Beksinski paintings from the Dmochowskis' collection has also been on display at the Archdiocese Museum in Warsaw since June 2021.

(Photo: Piotr Dmochowski, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8960820 )