Clichés 3 

Three monotypes from the Klisze series (1980-1981) were created by Tomasz Struk, whose work focused on the issue of time, and reflected on the traces left by human existence in history. Klisze are the follow-up on the artist’s search from the late 1970s, pursued in the Gesture Printing and Memory Art series, where he has used painting and graphic techniques to combine the past (frottages of prehistoric rock forms) with the present (photography, the artist's painting gesture) into a single whole. In Klisze, Struk used fragments of sea photographs, with paint streaks left by a thick paintbrush or a painting knife guided by a free gesture. As a result, the artist captured a double trace of a bygone moment – the moment of the artist’s painting gesture and the moment of the waves crashing against the sea shore in the photographs, which symbolised human fate. Tomasz Struk was born in 1952 in Bytom. In 1978, he graduated from the Faculty of Graphics from the Katowice branch of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. He lived and worked in Katowice, Berlin and Paris. Apart from his own work, he has also been involved in curatorial projects, co-organising numerous international art events and exhibitions. He collaborated with the Walter Bischoff Gallery in Berlin and the Starmach Gallery in Kraków. He was a scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture and Art, Statens Kunstakademi in Oslo (1985), and the Aldegrever Society (1989). He won numerous awards, including the Grand Prix at the Polish Graphics Triennial in Katowice and the International Graphics Triennial in Kraków (2000). He died in 2004 in Berlin.

Marlena Chybowska-Butler