Zdzisław BEKSIŃSKI, Untitled, 2 half of '90s

Zdzisław BEKSIŃSKI
Untitled, 2 half of '90s,
computer photomontage, 60 x 79.5 cm
unsigned, framed (70 x 100 cm)

Zdzisław BEKSIŃSKI (b. 1929 Sanok, d. 2005 Warsaw).
Graduate of architecture at the Cracow University of Technology (1952). Initially a photographer (1953-1960), then a draughtsman, graphic artist and painter. Between 1955 and 1959 simultaneously photographer and painter. In his work in the early 1960s, he also successfully engaged in sculpture. Member of ZPAP, and between 1957 and 1963 also of ZPAF.
After graduating from the Cracow University of Technology, Beksinski returned to his hometown of Sanok. Already in the first half of the 1950s, he made mature photographic works and became interested in painting, and later in matter painting. In 1957 an informal group was formed: Beksinski, Lewczynski, Schlabs, which remained active until 1959, although its last exhibition, organized by Otto Steinert, was held at the Deutsche Gesselschaft für Photografie in Cologne. Within the group, Beksinski was the most theoretically oriented artist and produced the most radical works of a surrealist/expressionist nature. A solo exhibition of his works took place at the Gliwice Photographic Society in 1958. In 1959, the Gliwice Photographic Society hosted an exhibition of this informal group, which went down in the annals of the history of Polish photography as Antiphotography. At the exhibition, Beksinski presented his famous work "The Corsets of the Sadist" and a set of fourteen untitled works, which were inspired by Surrealist photography and the theory of film editing of the famous Soviet constructivist Vsevolod Pudovkin. In the sets, Beksinski used amateur photographs, reproductions from magazines (including pornographic magazines), destroyed negatives, as well as reproductions of dictionary texts, which he juxtaposed in a form referring to film narration. He covered everything with shocking and surprising titles interacting with the juxtaposed photographs. In 1958, in issue 11 of "Photography," he published the text "The Crisis in Photography and the Prospects for Overcoming It" - one of the most important theoretical texts on photography written in Poland in the 20th centuryHis photographic output of one hundred and several dozen photographs, preserved exclusively at the National Museum in Wroclaw, is one of the most important achievements of Polish photography of the 20th century, being a precursor to body-art, conceptualism and photo-media art, as the artist, by definition, tried to transcend the existing canons in artistic photography.
Later he devoted himself to painting. In 1959 he participated in the prestigious Third Exhibition of Modern Art at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw and in 1960 in an even more important exhibition prepared on the occasion of the AICA Congress in Krakow. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Beksinski was one of the most interesting Polish painters; he referred to Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry and existential content. Around 1960 he made graphic works of expressionist-turpist form in the technique of heliotype on photographic material, as well as plaster and metal sculptures referring to the work of Henry Moore. In the second half of the 1960s, he devoted himself to printmaking and drawing saturated with perverse erotic obsessions that intermingled with symbols of death. Of great significance for his artistic career was an exhibition at the Old Orangery in Warsaw organized by Janusz Bogucki in 1964, which caused the artist to become fashionable and popular. From the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s, motifs of Far Eastern religions appeared in his work, in which the influence exerted on the artist by the Katowice-based artist Andrzej Urbanowicz, with whom, like Jerzy Lewczynski, he remained in close contact. Beksinski's work from the 1980s shows references to the method of "photographing dreams" (the artist's term), as well as to Baroque painting, 19th century painting and non-geometric abstraction, as a result of which he created an individual style, in works with erotic themes, in landscape or portraiture approaching apocalyptic visions, balancing on the border of kitsch. Since the late 1990s, the artist has also created digital prints - in color and black and white, drawing on his photographs. Very important is the artist's photographic work and the early period of his sculptural and painting work until the late 1970s. He was one of the few artists who, in the early 1960s, consciously abandoned the avant-garde heritage in search of a synthesis of various styles, which can be combined with the announcement of the postmodern breakthrough that occurred in world art in the 1960s and 1970s and in Polish art in the 1990s. Zdzislaw Beksinski's photographic work has been shown in several exhibitions: "Zdzislaw Beksinski. From Avant-Garde to Postmodernism," Regional Museum in Kutno, 1993; "Antiphotography and Continuity. Beksinski, Lewczynski, Schlabs," National Museum in Wroclaw, 1993; "Zdzislaw Beksinski. Photographs 1953-1959," National Museum in Gdansk, 2001/2002.
Works in collections: National Museum in Wroclaw, National Museum in Warsaw, Historical Museum in Sanok.