Henryk STAŻEWSKI (1894 - 1988), Relief, 1975

The catalog also presents a work by Henryk Sta żewski that belongs to the group of later reliefs that the artist created in 1975. Henryk Stażewski is one of the most colorful figures of Polish postwar art. He was not only a co-founder of the Polish avant-garde movement, but also had close contact with the world avant-garde milieu. He was friends with such artists as Piet Mondrian, Kazimierz Malewicz, Michel Seuphor and Theo van Doesburg. After graduating in 1920, he made his debut in a group exhibition at the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. By then he was already taking on new challenges, the first important fruit of which was the Constructivist manifesto published in 1923. Stażewski had been interested in the language of geometry in art since the 1920s and practiced such art (with interruptions) for the rest of his long life). Henryk Stażewski, on the other hand, began to construct his first reliefs in his sixties, when he had enjoyed the position of doyen of the Polish avant-garde for years. Stażewski's reliefs were a move into the third dimension of his painterly explorations. Enriching his geometric research with another dimension - geometric figures protruding from the picture plane are made of cardboard, fiberboard and wooden blocks - the artist believed that spatial relations can only be expressed through movement. Reliefs are subject to transformation as a result of changes in lighting that trigger the play of light and shadow, and as a consequence of the viewer's movement. When this happens, the spatial elements of the painting begin to cover different parts of the plane occurring behind them, generating the so-called relative movement of the painting.