Zdzislaw Beksinski, WITHOUT TITLE, 1982

Signed on reverse: BEKSIŃSKI | 1982

p.g. trace of 2 export stamps with signature

Provenance:

- The painting was purchased in 1990 in Paris for the Museum of European Art in Osaka, Japan.

- After the museum closed, private collection in Asia.

The painting exhibited, reproduced and described:

- The painting appeared in a program broadcast by Japanese television dedicated to the Osaka Museum of Eastern European Art in the early 1990s (Dmochowski Gallery NET - Filmoteka website);

- Beksinski. Paris-Osaka-Warsaw, Agra-Art Gallery, Warsaw 1 July - 4 September 2021, cat. no. 9, p. nlb. color ill;

- Japanese Collection. Beksinski and others, Agra-Art, Warsaw 2021, p. 33, color ill;

- Dmochowski Gallery NET (Virtual Museum) website.

Eroticism in the paintings of Zdzislaw Beksinski is associated almost exclusively with a series of drawings of a sadomasochistic nature created in the 1960s. The more significant event on the collector's market is the 1982 painting presented in the catalog, which is a blunt and perverse illustration of an erotic vision. Present in it - combining features of probability and pure fantasy, the characteristic motif of attachment, deformation and grotesqueness of figures - make the group of early, scandalous sketches here a striking analogy. Their aggressive, obscene sexuality was extremely perplexing for audiences and critics of the time: on the one hand, they were treated as "erotic instruction," and on the other, they were seen as references to fascist crimes, longing for the womb, and the martyrdom of the Polish nation, among other things. Several of the plays even made it into the collection of the Museum of the History of the Revolutionary Movement. Meanwhile, for the artist, they were simply a projection of private longings and obsessions - not only erotic, but also related to the fear of death and passing. It is no coincidence that eroticism occupies so much space in Beksinski's art. It is the erotic that stands closest to the sources of life and death; it is in love that a new existence is born, and finally it, too, can be lost, already in a more metaphorical sense. [Tadeusz Nyczek, Zdzislaw Beksinski or Taming of Death, "Student," No. 18 (97), 1973].

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♣ a fee will be added to the auctioned price, in addition to other costs, 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, a permanent exhibition of 250 works (paintings, drawings, photographs) by Zdzislaw Beksinski from the private collection of Anna and Piotr Dmochowski has been on display 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.