6.01.04

The early work of Andrzej Nowacki (1953- ), a philologist and art historian who has lived outside of Poland since the 1970s, was significantly influenced by his encounters with Henryk Stażewski (1894-1988) between 1982 and 1984, during which he repeatedly visited the studio of the pioneer of Polish geometric art. Nowacki recalls: "The fascination I felt at that time is almost indescribable. The most important thing for me was the atmosphere of harmony, peace and order, not so much in the man as in his paintings. You could sense in them the main motif of Stażewski's work: the order of chaos. And for me, who at that time was searching for inner order in my life (...), they were a kind of refuge. Also, this structured surface concentrated energy in a strange way. Herein lay the core of the inspiration for my own creative work". Inspired by geometric abstraction, the pictorial world created by the artist later underwent numerous transformations. Over time, Nowacki reduced the range of forms he used, so that by the end of the 20th century he was almost exclusively using the most basic geometric forms - the square and the line. He also increasingly abandoned symmetrical, static arrangements in favour of surfaces vibrating with colourful vertical lines and the creation of open compositions. This trend, which intensified after 2000, is particularly evident in linear reliefs such as 6.01.04. The surface of the painting, created by rhythmic composition, multicoloured panels of varying widths and different spacings between the individual elements, evokes a vibrant field of colour. The earlier tendency towards synthetic geometric art gave way in these works to a fascination with the energy of the image, the qualities of colour and colour as a carrier of emotion. By the mid-1990s, the artist had also simplified the titles of his works, abandoning the extensive poetic texts that accompanied them in favour of signing them only with the date of creation. Magdalena Lewoc