Memories of summer 5 

Bronisław Schlabs (1921–2000) was one of the most distinctive figures in twentieth-century Polish art. After graduating from the Poznań University of Technology in 1949, he became interested in photography. From the early 1950s, he was active not only as an artist but also as an exhibition organiser. His photographic abstractions from this period can be associated with the painterly informel movement. He would transform photographs of natural objects by manipulating prints or negatives, and also created relief-like images using non-painterly materials such as wire, roofing felt or mechanical parts. Among the most important exhibitions at the start of his career were *Subjective Fotografie*, organised by Otto Steinert in Essen (1958), and *The Sense of Abstraction in Contemporary Photography* at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1960), where Schlabs was the only artist invited from Poland. A key moment in his artistic path was meeting Zdzisław Beksiński and Jerzy Lewczyński while preparing the *Step into Modernity* exhibition (1957). Two years later, they jointly held a private show at the headquarters of the Gliwice Photographic Society. Widely discussed by photographers and critics alike, the exhibition was the result of bold experimentation within the medium of photography and expressed a desire to move away from its documentary function and reject technical and aesthetic conventions. Art critic and writer Alfred Ligocki (1913–1981) went so far as to describe their work as "anti-photography". In the early 1960s, following the death of his wife, Schlabs withdrew from the art world. He returned to artistic practice several years later, working in a figurative style with elements of abstraction. Most of his work continued to operate at the intersection of photography, graphic art and painting. This characteristic blending of media is visible in his paintings *Memory of Summer 4* and *Memory of Summer 5*, both held in the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin and shown there during the 12th Festival of Contemporary Painting in 1980. Marlena Chybowska-Butler