Zdzisław Beksiński

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Zdzisław Beksiński

Zdzisław Beksiński (born February 24, 1929 in Sanok ; † February 21, 2005 in Warsaw ) was a Polish painter , sculptor , graphic artist and designer .

Life

Beksiński's family had lived in Sanok for generations, where he too grew up. During the Second World War , he attended the local trade school and an underground high school . At that time he also learned to play the piano . After graduating from the men's high school in Sanok , he began studying architecture at the Technical University in Krakow . He lived in Cracow, later in Rzeszów, before returning to Sanok in 1955 with his wife Zofia. The couple had a son, Tomasz.

From 1959 to the early 1970s, Beksiński worked as a designer in the main designer department of the Autosan bus factory , which was founded by his great-grandfather Mateusz Beksiński. As a designer he designed prototypes for large buses and minibuses such as the SFW-1 Sanok, SFA-2, SFA-3, SFA-4 Alfa (1964) and the SFA-21. His designs were characterized by an innovative design, larger glass surfaces and ergonomic solutions.

In 1977 he left the city with his wife and son after the city authorities ordered their house to be demolished and moved to Warsaw, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

His son committed suicide in 1999 and his wife died after a serious illness.

Create

Today, hardly anyone associates Beksiński's name with black and white photography , but as a young artist he quickly became known when he won a number of prizes in international competitions. His pictures depicted human figures, often in unusual poses. Curved, frightened-looking models were wrapped with cord, their bodies were deformed or framed in such a way that only fragments of their bodies could be seen.

A little later he turned to the sculpture . At first he worked with purely abstract sculptures, mainly made of metal, wire and sheet metal . Reliefs and masks , which are kept in the Museum in Wrocław , were also made during this period .

His next artistic field of activity was drawing , although the drawings were initially semi-abstract. Then he went on to figuration full of eroticism , sadism and masochism . As in his photos, Beksiński showed deformed bodies in his drawings, which he often depicted tied up and forced during sexual intercourse. A very common motif is a small, tied up boy staring at a half-naked woman who is striking him with a pointed tail. Only at the end of his life did he return to drawing.

When he started painting around 1964, he devoted himself exclusively to fantastic , visionary and figurative painting. He painted his works with oil paint on hardboard. He never gave his paintings titles because he was convinced that they could be interpreted by any viewer. The first period of his painting was influenced by Eastern mysticism , which Beksiński worshiped at the time. The paintings from this period were full of symbols and mysterious hints, they were dark and terrifying.

For Beksiński, the first major exhibition success was the exhibition organized by the critic Janusz Bogucki in Warsaw in 1964, in which over thirty of his pictures with purely fantastic subjects were exhibited. Although the avant-garde criticism turned away from Beksiński at the time because they considered him a renegade , the exhibition was enthusiastically received by the public. The artist sold all the pictures on display there and became a well-known Polish painter.

After moving to Warsaw in 1977, his public reputation grew steadily, while criticism from his former allies intensified.

In the 80s Beksiński became famous not only in Poland but also abroad. He was friends with Piotr Dmochowski , who lived in Paris and was a lover and collector of his art. Dmochowski organized a number of exhibitions in France, Belgium, Germany and Japan. In the years 1989–1996, the author's gallery "Galerie Dmochowski - Musée galerie de Beksinski", founded by Dmochowski, existed in Paris. In the early 1990s there was a short permanent exhibition of his works in a private art museum of Eastern European countries in Osaka , Japan. This museum no longer exists, the whereabouts of the 70 or so Beksiński's paintings shown in this exhibition is unknown.

In the 1990s, Beksiński moved more and more away from the fantastic. He himself calls this period the "Baroque period". He was now working harder on the form because he felt that, although he remained true to the figuration, he should paint again as he did in his youth, that is, with only one goal: an area delimited by the frame in specific order to paint. As Malewicz called it. Beksiński called this period of his work the "Gothic period".

Since Beksiński was constantly looking for new ways to visualize his visions, after 2000 he experimented with the computer and the photocopier. He did not give up painting and drawing, but continued to use these forms of expression.

Opinions

Wojciech Krukowski, head of the Warsaw Center for Contemporary Art, says that Beksiński's work was specific and very personal. In his opinion, it is almost impossible to unambiguously identify this body of work, as it developed mainly beyond the sphere of interest of critics of the latest art.

“Zdzisław Beksiński had this rare courage to do exactly what he wanted in art. It seemed to many people that the artist was just endlessly spinning his macabre stories: about injury and disintegration of the body, about the dying and dead, about the fact that death is omnipresent and that every person is a skeleton - the symbol of his inevitable fate, within himself contains. "

- Andrzej Osęka

In the artist's oneiric visions, critics claimed to find traces of the traumatic war experiences (Beksiński lived near a ghetto), but the painter himself decidedly denied these interpretations. As in the case of Jerzy Duda-Gracz , who died three months earlier, Beksiński's works were popular with the public, but critics were often skeptical.

“We all have the problem of death in mind. I am no exception. Personally, I am more afraid of dying than of death itself. That is not a fear of nothingness, but of suffering, and I fear that more. "

- Beksiński

assassination

Beksiński was murdered in his apartment in Warsaw on the night of February 21-22, 2005, a few days before his 76th birthday. His killer was a 19-year-old from Wołomin who had worked for the artist with his family for many years. The motive for the murder was Beksiński's refusal to lend the man a small sum of money. The perpetrator stabbed the painter seventeen times and then carried the corpse out onto the balcony with his 16-year-old cousin and tried to remove the traces of the crime. Then he stole two cameras and CDs from the apartment. The perpetrators were arrested by the police two days after Beksiński's murder. In November 2006, both were sentenced - the murderer to 25 years and his 16-year-old cousin to 5 years in prison for the "psychological help in the murder". The perpetrator's lawyer appealed. On May 16, 2007, the appellate court upheld the judgment in the first instance.

Magdalena Grzebałkowska at the opening of the book "Beksińscy" at the Sanok Castle. (2014)
Zdzisław Beksiński Art Gallery. The west side of the Sanok Royal Castle .

testament

Beksiński bequeathed all of his artistic oeuvre to the Historical Museum in Sanok, to which he had already given around 300 works during his lifetime. After the artist's death, the museum received about 20 of his last paintings, about a thousand photos and graphics, and also all of his assets - apartments, bank facilities, computer equipment. The museum's collections were also expanded to include multimedia recordings, letters or films documenting the family life of the creator. The museum currently has the largest collection of the artist's works, comprising a few thousand pictures, reliefs, sculptures, drawings, graphics and photographs.

His ashes were buried in the Sanok cemetery .

Works collections

  • The Historical Museum in Sanok , heir to Zdzisław Beksiński's artistic estate, currently has the largest collection of his works.
  • The Municipal Art Gallery in Częstochowa exhibits around 50 early paintings and around 100 drawings.
  • The Wrocław Museum owns many of the artist's works from the “abstract period” of his work. These are a donation of the pictures that he was unable to take with him from Sanok in 1977.
  • The largest private collection of his pictures and drawings belongs to Anna and Piotr Dmochowski.

literature

  • Joanna Kułakowska-Lis: Zdzisław Beksiński (Polish / English edition), Bosz sc, Olszanica / Lesko 2008, ISBN 978-83-7576-018-7 .
  • Duża dokumentacja dotycząca Beksińskiego i szereg wystaw jego prac. (The great documentation about Beksiński and a whole series of exhibitions of his works).
  • Strona poświęcona Zdzisławowi Beksińskiemu, jego życiu, twórczości, biografii artystycznej i rodzinie. (The website about Zdzisław Beksiński, his life, work, his artistic biography and family).

Web links

Commons : Zdzisław Beksiński  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In July 2002, during the opening of the photography exhibition in the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw, its last exhibition in the capital.
  2. ↑ "Beksińscy. Portret podwójny" .


personal data
SURNAME Beksiński, Zdzisław
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish painter, sculptor, printmaker and designer
DATE OF BIRTH February 24, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Sanok , Poland
DATE OF DEATH February 21, 2005
Place of death Warsaw , Poland