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Zdzislaw Beksinski, WITHOUT TITLE, 1971

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Lot description Show orginal version
Estimations: 127 937 - 255 874 EUR
Additional fees: +5% / 3% Droit de suite
92.0 x 73.0cm - oil, fiberboard

Signed on the reverse on the plate on the right: BEKSIŃSKI 1971, on the vertical strip the number 13, below a sticker of the Contemporary Gallery in Warsaw with the date of the exhibition 7 XII 72 - 7 I 73.





Exhibited painting:



- Zdzislaw Beksinski. Paintings from 1971-1972, Galeria Współczesna "Ruch" Klub Międzynarodowej Prasy i Książki, Warsaw 7 XII 1972 - 7 I 1973.





Reproduced image:



- Dmochowski Gallery NET (Virtual Museum) website.



Zdzislaw Beksinski became known to a wider audience in the early 1970s, when - after a period of fascination with photography and sculpture - he devoted himself entirely to painting. A huge role in promoting the artist's first achievements in this field was played by an exhibition organized by Janusz Bogucki in December 1972 at the Contemporary Gallery in Warsaw. The exhibition included several dozen of the painter's most recent paintings from a series of so-called metaphysical landscapes. Created between 1971 and 1972, the works were characterized by the presence of disturbing death designations and dark, depressing colors. All of them appeared under the collective title "Waiting," which the author - who considered the naming issue completely unnecessary - gave them at the request of a critic. The thriller scenes, full of skeletons, tombstones and tormented creatures from hell, received a lively response in the press of the time, and were even used as the basis for a documentary film, Rozmowa Mistrza z śmiercią / The Master's Conversation with Death (directed by Franciszek Kuduk, 1973).


One of these famous macabre visions was the painting offered in this catalog, which - like a projection of a nightmarish dream - presents a peculiar version of the end of the world. In a representation close to the grotesque, a hairless female figure sits on the rubble of a ruined city and gnaws on bones. She is emaciated, terrified and crippled. The drastic image is strongly contrasted with the portrait's elegant attire: a jacket with a fancy ruffle, a red scarf, a snow-white shirt and green high-heeled pumps. Complementing the composition with a number of other, secondary props - including a miniature cross and shiny glass beads - surprises and invites interpretation. The multiplication of meanings, indispensable with such a content load, took place in spite of the author, who emphasized in interviews: "I never ask myself the question 'what does it mean' either with regard to my paintings or those of others. Meaning is completely meaningless to me. It is worth as much as the taste of chocolate in a literary description (Meaning is meaningless to me, interview trans. Z. Taranienko, "Art", 1979, no. 4, p. 34). For most of his contemporaries, however, the landscapes evoked such simple associations that the artist was soon hailed as a singer of the "total scarification of the world." Despite the charge of exuding horror, many visitors decided to buy paintings from the "Expectations" group, and the entire exhibition was considered a landmark in the painter's oeuvre. He wrote down his impressions after it in his diary: to paint now I have to paint like mad, because for July, and maybe even June, I have to have paintings for an exhibition with Urbanowicz and Wańek, so if everything was bought (hi,hi), then I have nothing to exhibit, I am naked! (M. Grzebałkowska, Beksińscy. Portret podwójny, Krakow 2016, p. 156).







Zdzislaw Beksinski (Sanok 24 II 1929 - Warsaw 21 II 2005) studied from 1947 to 1952 at the Faculty of Architecture of the Cracow University of Technology.


He was a self-taught artist who achieved an unquestioned 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, as of June 2021, a permanent exhibition of 30 Beksinski paintings from the Dmochowskis' collection is also on display at the Archdiocese Museum in Warsaw.



(Photo: Piotr Dmochowski, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8960820 )
Auction
Contemporary Art Auction
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Date
11 December 2022 CET/Warsaw
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Start price
106 614 EUR
Estimations
127 937 - 255 874 EUR
Hammer price
130 496 EUR
Hammer price without Byuer's Premium
108 747 EUR
Overbid
122%
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