Zdzislaw Beksinski, P4, 1998

92.0 x 88.0cm - oil, fiberboard Signed on reverse on panel: P4 [in frame] | BEKSIŃSKI | 1998

on the reverse a sticker with information on how to store and conserve the painting, p.g. trace of an export stamp.


Reproduced and described painting:


- Zdzislaw Beksinski, BOSZ Olszanica 1999, p. 135, ill. in color.



Zdzislaw Beksinski's painting was characterized by a tendency to repeat and process the same motifs. However, it did not result from a desire to convey symbolic messages, but from a fascination with their "universality." The source of creative exploration and improvisation was primarily the human figure. The specificity of her unusual representations was characterized by Wieslaw Banach: Variations on the theme of the human figure are present throughout the artist's work (...) Their structure most often consists of bones, "flayed" skin or drapery. Sometimes they are literally constructed from garbage. They play their silent role without individualistic features, without portrait references. The human figure throughout Beksinski's art is actually a phantom. Man appears as a bizarre mannequin, a puppet, which with its gesture and posture usually expresses suffering or loneliness, but is so detached from the real body that it cannot reflect his physical anguish. Even in erotic acts we have the spiritual aspect of the "performance" more shouted out than its physicality. Often such tormented and deformed figures are interpreted by viewers as corpses or wraiths. Indeed, in the fantasy period they sometimes play such a role, but most often in a perverse, persiflage way. They irritate, provoke, suggest a kitschy spectacle with vampires. Beksinski's perversity was rarely read by viewers as the artist would have wished. Contrary to his intention, it was seen as a cheap pseudo-literary play on art. (W. Banach, Figure [in:] Zdzislaw Beksinski 1929-2005, BOSZ Olszanica, 2021, pp. 76-78)

In the featured image, the presence of a figure is suggested only by the outline of a monumental, deformed body, visible from beneath a layer of material with the structure of a dense, spider web. Like a statue, it dominates the vast, apocalyptic landscape - the artist's favorite setting.





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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 been permanently installed 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 )