Jan ZIEMSKI (1920 - 1988), Untitled

acrylic, slats, board; 48.5 x 50 x 11.5 cm;
Signed on the reverse: Jan Ziemski.

Jan Ziemski was a member of the Lublin art community. With his participation, the local art group "Castle" began to form in 1956. It included artists including Włodzimierz Borowski, Tytus Dzieduszycki and Ryszard Kiwerski, as well as art critics Jerzy Ludwiński and Hanna Ptaszkowska. A year later, during their third joint exhibition, the artists published the group's assumptions, which can be boiled down to perfecting the art form and conducting intensive research on its development. After years of Stalinism and the reigning doctrine of Socialist Realist painting resulting in absolute isolation from world progress in the visual arts, this manifesto ceases to be a trivial declaration.
The year 1956 is an exceptionally important moment in Jan Ziemski's individual work. It was then that the artist began work on the Cosmic Series, with which he turned the art he had been practicing toward an abstract form of artistic expression. Beginning in 1958, he worked on a series of Formura reliefs. The artist develops the emerging issue of space or the formation of matter, in the light of analytical sciences - mathematics and physics. In 1965, he was invited to participate in the Golden Grape symposium in Zielona Gora. During a train trip he took at the time, he observed a snapshot optical phenomenon of two rhythms superimposed on each other. This fortuitous image eventually shaped the form of reliefs generating movement in space, which today are highly regarded by collectors. Bożena Kowalska vividly characterizes the means used and the effect that Jan Ziemski aimed to achieve: "These were already those [...] square pictorial surfaces on which he affixed in flat relief, rhythmically arranged, and arched slats. He then fixed in an analogous rhythm the slats rising in a convex arc above the relief ground. In this way, the two rhythms of the semicircles overlap, with the movement moving past them, producing the phenomenon of a kind of interference, a flight of a non-existent and indefinite form." The resulting effect also fulfilled the idea that Jan Ziemski was working on regarding the problem of "disappearing images." Its fulfillment was the form presented in 1969 at the Fourth Golden Grape Symposium in Zielona Gora.