Signed on reverse: IZ | BEKSIŃSKI
On the reverse p.g. stamp authorizing export with signature
Provenance:
- The painting was purchased in 1990 in Paris for the Museum of European Art in Osaka, Japan.
- After the museum closed, private collection in Asia.
Image exhibited, reproduced and described:
- Beksinski. Paris-Osaka-Warsaw, Agra-Art Gallery, Warsaw 1 July - 4 September 2021, cat. no. 38, pp. nlb. ill. in color;
- Japanese Collection. Beksinski and others, Agra-Art, Warsaw 2021, p. 110, color ill.
Beksinski's brush circles almost in constant orbits - these words of Tadeusz Nyczek - a friend of Zdzislaw Beksinski and an expert on his work, perfectly approximate the artist's predilection for drawing from a repertoire of the same motifs. One of the most popular was the human figure, with a usually far from realistic and deformed body. The representation of the hybrid figure presented in the catalog bears the marks of the formal evolution that the painting of the famous "photographer of visions" has undergone in the last twenty years:
"Fantastic Period" brought Beksinski fame and it seemed that the artist would remain faithful to it. And yet, by the early 1980s, he had already gradually abandoned this spatial, landscape-like vision, limiting the motif to one or more figures, usually placed against an indefinite background. The painting became much more synthetic and it was no longer the "photographing of a dream or dream" that was most important, but the painting itself (W. Banach, Beksinski, BOSZ Olszanica 1999, p. 17).
The composition with a three-legged figure walking in pseudo space is an example of the painter-perfectionist's quest to create "his own form." Its main idea was to give the plane matter of painting the volume proper to sculpture. This effect was achieved here by expert handling of chiaroscuro modeling and skillful contrasting of colors. The "dynamism and three-dimensionality" thus brought out make the phantom creation similar to a bone-robotic mechanism, the parts of which are perfectly matched to each other.
(Sanok 24 II 1929 - Warsaw 21 II 2005) studied at the Faculty of Architecture of the Cracow University of Technology from 1947 to 1952.
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 major 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, a permanent exhibition of 250 works (paintings, drawings, photographs) by Zdzislaw Beksinski from the private collection of Anna and Piotr Dmochowski has been on display at the Nowa Huta Cultural Center. Meanwhile, as of June 2021, a permanent exhibition of 30 Beksinski paintings from the Dmochowskis' collection is also on display at the Archdiocese Museum in Warsaw.
(Photo: Piotr Dmochowski, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8960820 )