Tadeusz Dominik (1928-2014), LANDSCAPE,1980

tapestry/wool, linen, 100 x 113 cm
signed, dated and described on the reverse, on the patch:
DOMINIK | GOBELIN | 1979 | 100 x 115 | "Landscape" author's initial and inventory numbers and illegible stamps.

At his first solo exhibition, held at the Zachęta Gallery in 1957, Dominik showed oil works, watercolors, drawings, paste-ups, as well as 5 textiles from 1956-1957. In his introductory text, Aleksander Wojciechowski pointed out the peculiar consistency in thinking about painting with a variety of techniques: "His woodcuts were shown at the last Venice Biennale, he received prizes, awards and purchases for his graphics. [...] His prints were painterly, colorful in action even when color was only a minor accent in the overall composition. Then alternating works in oil, drawings, woodcuts, watercolors were born. The boundaries between techniques blurred, everything began to serve a common purpose: the experience of color. To show the emotional impact of a colorful plane, spot, line.... In Dominik's recent works we must look for purely painterly experiences. Aesthetic emotions liberated from the action of the subject, anecdote or intellectual inquiry. What remains, however, are painting experiments, repeated many times in various techniques" (Tadeusz Dominik, November 1957, Warsaw "Zachęta" [cat. exhibition], Warsaw 1957, p. nlb.).
In 1961, Dominik presented two textiles at an exhibition of works by Professor Anna Sledziewska and her studio team at Zachęta. The introduction to the catalog reads: "The fabrics exhibited in the exhibition are the work of painters. The question arises to what extent this traditional weaving workshop, limited in its possibilities, inhibits the painter's vision? Meanwhile, the individual compositions show that the technique can become an instrument for the conscious expression of painterly concerns. [...] In such an approach, weaving ceases to be a craft and becomes a painterly work realized in a material other than oil and paint" (Zofia Szydłowska, Kilka słów o tkaninie współczesnej, [in:] Tkanina artystyczna. Glass, April 1961, Warsaw "Zachęta" [cat. exhibition], Warsaw 1961, p. nlb). What characterized the weaving works of Polish artists of the 1960s and 1970s, and what caused this entire group of artists to be called the "Polish school of textiles," was, according to Marta Kowalewska, "sculptural and
painterly thinking," "treating the material as an integral element of the work of art," and "the poetics of the message" (M. Kowalewska, Historia rewolucji, [in:] Splendor of Fabric, 9.03-19.05.2013, Zachęta - National Gallery of Art [cat. exhibition], Warsaw 2013, p. 16).