Announcingnews

Alfred Lenica, a musician and a painter by profession, lived in Kraków during World War II. There, he met the painter Jerzy Kujawski, to whom he owed his interest in Surrealism. Although he returned to Poznań in 1945 (in the same year he joined the Polish Workers' Party and the Trade Union of Polish Artists from the Poznań District), the artist was still connected to the environment centred around Tadeusz Kantor. From 1965. he belonged to the Kraków Group. He was one of the painters who exhibited his works in 1948 during the First Exhibition of Modern Art in Krakow, which went down in the history of Polish art as an important event. On the one hand, his work was visibly inspired by Cubism, Surrealism, or more generally by modern art; on the other hand, his ideological views (membership of the party) meant that he also painted numerous works in the spirit of Socialist Realism. In 1956, at almost 60, he moved permanently to Warsaw, where he was associated with the Krzywe Koło Gallery. In the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin there is a painting entitled Zapowiadający nowość [Announcing a Novelty] from 1960. It is a work from a period when Lenica had already developed his painting style. The artist's abstractions usually have an expansive, clearly expanding semantic field of work - which is also the case here. Diverse shapes are numerous forms resembling bones and skulls, are surrounded by a precise contour, and a dark blue background emerges from the depths. In the painting, the forms merge into a vibrant, highly dynamic composition. In his abstract works, one can also find a search similar to that made by Wassily Kandinsky - a rendering of emotions and experiences combined with a painterly depiction of music.

Beata Małgorzata Wolska