Boguslaw SZWACZ (1912-2009), Untitled, 1957

gouache, cardboard; 140 x 70 cm.
EXHIBITED AND REPRODUCED:
- Piotr Słodkowski, From novelty to contemporaneity, Works by Bogusław
Szwacz from 1957 to the field of art of the postwar decade,
[Warsaw b.r.], p. 44.

The painting is one of a series of more than a dozen monumental gouaches found
in the studio of the artist and teacher at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.
Boguslaw Szwacz debuted at a difficult time for Polish art, when
socialist realist art was dominant. After the death of Joseph Stalin and the advent of the
so-called "thaw," including in the field of fine arts, he decided to
to devote his attention to abstract art, which he believed was absolutely
universal. Thanks to the scholarship he won, he managed in 1947 to
to travel to Paris. It was then that he became a member of the group "Le Surréalisme Révolutionnaire"
and established contacts with Fernand Léger, Édouard Pignon,
Estèv and Noël Arnaud. These two factors led to the fact that from
1955 the artist abandoned figurative painting and began to create an authorial
concept of Ars-Horme art - "Art of Moving the Imagination."