Zdzislaw Beksinski, WITHOUT TITLE, 1974

73.0 x 60.0 cm - oil, plate signed on the reverse on the plate: BEKSIŃSKI 74

l.d. stamp authorizing export abroad



Reproduced painting:

- Zdzislaw Beksinski Art Promotion Archive (https://www.beksinskiarchiwum.net/ archive1,artwork_beksinski_skany,images,chronologically,years_6883.html).



The fantastic period in Zdzislaw Beksinski's art, falling in the years 1968-1984, is not only filled with an atmosphere of anxiety famous metaphysical landscapes, but also numerous variants of representations of faces and heads. Shot frontally, in profile, en trois quarts, or expanded to busts - they constitute a peculiar gallery of images. The artist, using features inherent in portrait painting, places before the viewer characters from his universe in dangerous close-up: Patched and stuccoed skins wrinkle on the forehead and chin, adhering smoothly to the arches of the eyebrows, to the cheekbones, to the cartilage of the nose. When the skin runs out of "at hand", it is replaced by a rag cap to cover the skull or to fill a cavity on the cheek. Sometimes the skin flaps that don't come together unravel the harelip of the lip or the vagina of the eye, revealing the impenetrable darkness of the empty interior of the skull. (H. Krajewska, Paintings and Drawings by Zdzislaw Beksinski, "Artistic Review" 1970, no. 5, pp. 42-47)

Confrontation "eye to eye" with the faces of monstrous figures always runs along two separate tracks - horror of the macabre and admiration of technical mastery. Similar feelings are evoked by the "portrait" of a woman - a specter from 1974, presented in the catalog. Her slender, cinnabar face is covered with tiny scars and marked with a mysterious scar reminiscent of the letters of the esoteric alphabet. In place of the eyes glows a supernatural glow of empty blinds, and from the gaping mouth protrude teeth, in which the creature holds an ornamental pendant. The interior of the medallion is filled with an intricately painted figure of an insect-like creature stretched between quasi-herbs. This unexpected jewelry accessory with heraldic connotations is a kind of persiflage - a procedure often used by the artist in the 1970s. Beksinski thus engaged in a kind of dialogue with art history, equipping the figures with props and elements of clothing from previous centuries, such as an orifice. The decorative collar adorned, for example, the neck of the scabrous man in the 1984 painting, referring the viewer directly to associations with a dignitary of the modern court. About the so-called "Head with an orifice" - wrote Piotr Dmochowski: This is also one of those paintings in which, ironically, Beksinski referred to the great Dutchmen of the 17th century. (...) Kryza here is a wink in the direction of the old masters. Of course, Beksinski could not paint an otherwise tragic picture without weaving at least some small joke into it. Bathed in hellish red, the depiction of a ghastly creature piercing the demonic "gaze" is an example of skillfully weaving an element of pastiche into an artwork, which, while shattering stereotypical interpretations, has something more to offer than the thrill of horror.



♣ An additional fee will be added to the Purchase Price based on 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 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, 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 )