Arrangement 2 

Układ 2 (1971) is a piece by Lech Kunka from the period, when – according to the artist himself – his structural (biological) painting transformed into the constructivist (geometric) one, originating in the fascination with numbers. At the time, he created ascetic pictures, in which he was juxtaposing homogeneous, geometric forms against a monochromatic background, which usually consisted of small disks arranged according to a mathematical logic.Kunka was one of the first and most outstanding students of Władysław Strzemiński at the Higher School of Fine Arts in Łódź, founded in 1945, where Strzemiński taught history of art and principles of form. In 1948, he received a scholarship from the French government, during which he studied painting at the Académie Moderne under Fernand Léger –  both of these artists have had an enormous impact on his artistic development.In the 1940s, he was greatly inspired by Strzemiński's Powidoki series, and later by constructivist and unitarian theories which assumed the minimisation of means of expression and the combination of art and science. In the 1950s, after Kunka’s stay in Paris, his figurative paintings with strong emotional overtones clearly referred to Léger’s painting solutions. After a couple of years, Kunka freed himself from this influence, turning to abstraction and the study of structures. The paintings he created in the 1960s were the result of an exploration of the relationship between art and science, which was inspired by discoveries made thanks to the electron microscope. His compositions increasingly featured a circle – one of the most prominent elements of his structural images-reliefs. He organised these oft-irregular shapes into rhythms and structures resembling biological cells under a microscope. Until the very end, the propensity to creating uniform and synthetic forms competed with his interest in structures with rich texture and intense colour, which freely combined these individual elements.

Marlena Chybowska-Butler