Relief No 26 - 1965

Henryk Stażewski, as an artist who built the legend of the Polish interwar avant-garde, became after the Second World War the mainstay of new generations of modernists, who sought the local roots of the movement and international contacts. After studying at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts under Stanisław Lentz (1913-1919), he organised the most important groups of the modern movement in the country: Polish Expressionists (1917, from 1919 Formists), Block [(1924), Praesens (1926), a.r. (1929), as well as abroad: Cercle et Carré (1929) and Abstraction-Création (1931). His style oscillated between the experiences of Cubism in his youth and Picasso's Surrealism and Classicism in the 1930s and 1940s, but the works most numerous and typical of his œuvre represent geometric abstraction. They were already created during the heroic period of the avant-garde. From the second half of the 1950s for almost two decades Stażewski was engaged in creating reliefs. Initially, he used mixed technique (cork, wood, oil paint) to construct polychrome compositions consisting of organically curved, less frequently rectangular figures separated from the background by means of painting texture and collage effects. In 1964-1965, abstractions made of uniform industrial materials, copper and aluminium sheets, appeared, maintained in monochromatic colours and exploiting the natural properties of the raw material and its processing: etching, chromium plating, gilding, silvering, decaying. The image-relief became a collection of plates cut from a metal sheet, mounted on invisible blocks in such a way that they seemed to levitate in front of the background. Stażewski exploited the multi-view nature of such constellations as the movement of the viewer changed the position of the elements in relation to each other. Natural chiaroscuro and reflections provided by the shine of the material and artificial, theatrical lighting also played an important role. They were used to arrange the reliefs during an exhibition on the 40th anniversary of the artist's creative work (1965/1966).

Szymon Piotr Kubiak