Painting CXXIII

Obraz CXXIII (1962) is the 123rd work by Stefan Gierowski, belonging to a series created since 1957, when the artist decided to name his works with Roman numerals, rather than literary titles – something which he does to this day. The artist decided that it should be the viewer, who should name the painting and understand its meaning in contact with the image and its energy. He abandoned figurative and representational painting in favour of attempts to ‘embody’ the visual by painting pictures devoid of anything, but colour. He radically reduced formal means to lines and simple colours. His monochromes, including the painting in the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin, are not uniform. The gradation of color and the resulting luminosity enabled the artist to achieve an illusion of depth, while the lines crossing the canvas, which resemble comets, make the works dynamic, at the same time introducing an emotional element. In subsequent works from the 1960s, the artist refers to scientific phenomena such as shock wave, ballistics and kinetics. He is also constantly pursuing colours, as well as issues of light and space.Stefan Gierowski is considered a classic of Polish non-geometric abstraction. He graduated from art history at the Jagiellonian University and from painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. He was a student of Karol Frycz (himself a student of Stanisław Wyspiański) and formist Zbigniew Pronaszko. In the 1950s, he was associated with the Krzywe Koło avant-garde gallery in Warsaw, which had a huge impact on Gierowski's work, as well as on Polish modern art in general. Between 1961 and 1996 he ran a painting studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. When asked about the aims and method of his teaching, he replied that the only limit to his open curriculum was painting, which should be understood first and foremost as an individual way to share the view of the world.

Marlena Chybowska-Butler