73.00 x 54.00 cm - oil, canvas,signed on the reverse on canvas g.: "I found a four-leaf clover" | KMikulski | Krakow.1991
on the g. strip of the loom: 53.5 x 72.5 [crossed out] 11 72.5 x 53.5 S/89
Image exhibited, described and reproduced:
-Kazimierz Mikulski. Painting, Piano Nobile, Krakow II - III 1993, p. nlb, color ill;
- Kazimierz Mikulski. Painting, exhibition catalog, IV - V 1999, Desa Unicum, Struve's Villa Gallery, Warsaw, p. nlb., item 33, color ill;
-Kazimierz Mikulski. Masters of Polish Contemporary Painting, Art & Business Club, Poznań 1999, p. 53, item 53 color ill;
-Kazimierz Mikulski. Painting, Desa Unicum Publishers, Warsaw 2000, p. 127, color ill;
-Kazimierz Mikulski. Painting, Desa Dzieła Sztuki i Antyki, Cracow 18 - 30 XI 2003, p. 55, item 41, il. b.
Janina Kraupe wrote about the work of Kazimierz Mikulski, who combined elements of surrealism with poetic naiveté, as follows: Mikulski's poetry and years of working for the "Groteska" theater explain very well the setting of his paintings, which express reality metaphorically - a woman deprived of individual characteristics, never associated with a portrait, reduced to the role of a beautiful idol, no longer threatening the author with anything - artificial butterflies, artificial butterflies, paper flowers, the smooth greens of a spring meadow reassure the viewer that he is watching a pure construction of an imaginary world - an ideal creation possible only in a waking dream, because a dream is always unpredictable and it is difficult to evoke a mood of pure idyll on request.
Kazimierz Mikulski (Krakow 1918 - Krakow 1998) began his studies in painting before World War II at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, and continued them from 1939 to 1940 under Professor Fryderyk Pautsch at the Kunstgewerbeschule, established during the occupation in place of the Academy. After the war, he completed two years of acting studies at the Drama Studio at the Old Theater in Cracow and worked as an actor until 1948. At the same time, in 1945, he graduated from the Youth Film Workshop. From 1948 to 1979 he was the art director and set designer of the Groteska Theater in Cracow, for which he designed puppets, costumes, decorations, etc. At the same time, all the time he was engaged in painting and activity in the circle of Tadeusz Kantor, at first as a member of the Young Visual Artists Group, and from 1957 in the Cracow Group, of which he was co-founder and president in 1965-1967. He was also a member of the Cricot 2 theater company, and played in the productions Water Hen, Nadobnisie i koczkodany, Dead Class and in his own play Circus. In his paintings from the second half of the 1940s, the artist depicted light, linear forms floating in empty spaces. It was a painting that was both surrealistic and abstract. But already ca. 1950 he began to paint in his characteristic way - rejecting abstraction, he presented countless variants and arrangements of several favorite motifs (head or figure of a woman-doll, cats, butterflies).
