Zdzislaw Beksinski, WITHOUT TITLE, 1980

61,0 x 73,0cm - oil, fiberboard

signed on the reverse: BEKSIŃSKI | 1980

next to it trace of an export stamp



Provenance: painting purchased in the 1980s at the Alicja and Bożena Wahl Art Gallery in Warsaw.



Zdzislaw Beksinski, an architect by training, abandoned his learned profession shortly after graduating from the Cracow University of Technology. According to the artist, architecture, which at the time was subordinated to Socialist Realist doctrine, was the domain of collective activity and did not give him a chance for creative self-realization. Instead, it recurred later as one of the main motifs in his works. Enjoying great popularity, his paintings from the Fantastic period (1968-1983) were filled with countless variations on the theme of Gothic cathedrals, abandoned tenements, fortified fortresses, as well as - bearing clear associations with death - tombstones, crypts, stelae, or portals leading to the dark beyond. The depicted architecture, far from being realistic, was a "photographed vision" close to dream poetics, filled with an atmosphere of mystery and anxiety, typical of metaphysical landscapes.

Tadeusz Nyczek writes the following about Beksinski's paintings from this period: The sky, although similar to the sky, is never a natural sky. Even the clouds, so often depicted, are clouds only as Beksinski invented them. This sky can be yellowish in one painting, ochre in another, ashen, emerald or red in another. Depending on the overall color tone that prevails in the painting. The tree is generally the same, a leafless tree with thick, thin branches, sometimes bent in the wind, usually a strong one, engulfing everything in the painting, living and dead. The surface of the ground is usually either scorched soil, a swamp with puddles of standing water, or an indefinite "ground" on which bones, sheets of paper, or twisted intestines may just as well lie. When painting a house, Beksinski will never paint a window with a frame and shutters, a door with a handle and a roof with a chimney. In place of the window there will be a dark hole covered with a cobweb, and if not, tongues of fire will surely come out from inside, or it will just be a black hole leading nowhere. The resemblance, sometimes very distant, to reality indicates the undoubtedly dream-like provenance of this art. It is in a dream that we see the world distorted - but for us then quite natural (T. Nyczek, Zdzisław Beksiński, Arkady, Warsaw 1989, p. 15).



♣ to the auctioned price, in addition to other costs, will be added a fee resulting from the right of the creator and his heirs to receive remuneration in accordance with the Law of February 4, 1994 - on Copyright and Related Rights (droit de suite).

Zdzislaw Beksinski (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 unquestionable 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, an exhibition of 250 works (paintings, drawings, photographs) by Zdzislaw Beksinski from the private collection of Anna and Piotr Dmochowski has become a permanent fixture at the Nowa Huta Cultural Center. Meanwhile, a permanent exhibition of 30 Beksinski paintings from the Dmochowskis' collection has also been on display at the Archdiocese Museum in Warsaw since June 2021.

(Photo: Piotr Dmochowski, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8960820 )