Zdzislaw Beksinski, WITHOUT TITLE, 1972

61.0 x 73.0 cm - oil, fiberboard signed on the back vertically along the l. edge: BEKSIŃSKI | 1972

Painting described and reproduced:
- Tadeusz Nyczek, Zdzisław Beksiński, Warsaw 1989, item 16, p. 52 (ill.), b/w, repeated on inside cover;
- Beksinski. Photographies Dessins Sculptures Peintures, Anna et Piotr Dmochowski API, "Galerie Dmochowski- musée - galerie de Beksinski", Paris, item 379, p. 293,
color ill.

Provenance:
- Alicja and Bożena Wahl Art Gallery, Warsaw.

- Private collections.



Zdzislaw Beksinski's paintings painted in the early 1970s often feature motifs with the architecture of ghost towns. In a 1972 work exhibited here, crumbling
crumbling edifices float in the air, seeming to fly in one direction and the horror of the omnipresent cataclysm is only weakened by colorful balloons floating between the ghostly buildings.
The year 1972 was an important moment in the building of Beksinski's position - in an artistic, but also in a commercial sense.
After the famous exhibition at the Contemporary Gallery in Warsaw, organized by Janusz Bogucki, the artist sold all the paintings exhibited there.

Zdzislaw Beksinski's biographer, Magdalena Grzebałkowska, described this breakthrough, stating in her book, among other things: Beksinski soon faced an excess of everything - work, exhibitions, money and people.
Between 1972 and 1974 he will paint a hundred paintings, customers will buy them still wet, straight from the easel. (...) But for now it is still the beginning of the decade. The disaster of the harvest is yet to come.
(Magdalena Grzebałkowska, Beksińscy. Portret podwójny, Krakow 2014, p. 154)



♣ 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 Act of February 4, 1994 - on Copyright and Related Rights (droit de suite)


(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 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 )