Stefan GIEROWSKI (1925 - 2022), Image DCCLXXIV, 2001

oil, canvas; 140 x 100 cm;
Signed, dated and described on the back: SGierowski / Ob DCCLXXIV / 01.
Image included in the archive of the artist's works compiled by the Stefan Gierowski Foundation.

Non-objective art, as Stefan Gierowski called his worḱ, in his interpretation is based on the action of color, which is to directly affect́ the viewer̨. Important elements that the painter also explores are space, line and light. Since the 1950s, Stefan Gierowski has been creating a series of numbered paintings made exclusively with oil paint on canvas, the first of which was created in 1957. In an interview with Jacek Michalak and Marta Sklodowska, the artist claims to have painted about 1,000 paintings, which is much less than, for example, Stanislaw Fijalkowski, who claimed to have created about 1,600 canvases. This small number of numbered works, testifies to Stefan Gierowski's thoughtfulness, contemplation and research approach to the field of art he practiced.
Stefan Gierowski attributes emotional values to colors - that is, he recognizes that specific colors trigger corresponding feelings. At the same time, he attributes symbolic meanings to colors. The painter studied the physical characteristics of color using scientific works on physics and optics and on color. His readings on the subject led him to several conclusions about colors. The first is that color vision by assumption may assume an error due to the eye's lack of sensitivity to at least tones and shades (so-called color blindness) or simply personal preferences. On the other hand, the symbolic meaning of colors is not uniform due to the heterogeneous cultural code. The last important element of seeing color is the way the artist uses it - the intensity of the hue or its lasciviousness, the structure of the applied paint, its juxtaposition with other tones and its interaction. In the case of Stefan Gierowski, structural experiments - described by him as a homogeneous gesture of the artist - were a deliberate intention stemming from the desire to find answers to the subsequent questions "what happens if...".
The moment a line enters the space of Gierowski's paintings, another aspect of his canvases that is space and a certain energetic charge it contains also appears. According to the artist's own claim, even a straight line can bring unease to a composition, leaving aside the very fact that it is ultimately not objectively straight. According to the artist, the line dividing the canvas violates the painting. It changes its space and at the same time affects another aspect important to the painter - the light in the painting - its luminosity.


Light in the painter's paintings, in his opinion, is the most recognizable feature of his works, which he mentions: "That's why the recognizability of my paintings is not due to some consistent drawing for them, but rather to what happens with the light that is born from the colors. Because color is then meaningful when it gives light. And what else is most important, and what is often forgotten now, is that good paintings - and old paintings, and contemporary paintings, and abstract paintings, and non-abstract paintings - are all distinguished by the fact that light goes from them. It goes from them, not falls on them and gives a reflection. The glare is created from the paint itself."


Despite the formal diversity that Stefan Gierowski's works take on, there is a logical sequence of considerations in them. His canvases are a monumental work of life, just like the counted paintings of Roman Opalka, but they are not planned with such a mathematical strategy. Stefan Gierowski graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Since 1949, he lived in Warsaw. From 1956 to 1961 he worked with the Krzywe Koło Gallery run by Marian Bogusz. From 1992 to 1996 he was a teacher at the Warsaw academy, where he served as dean of the Faculty of Painting in the second half of the 1970s. In 1986 he was awarded the title of full professor. In 1980 he was awarded the Jan Cybis Prize. In 1981 he was a member of the Organizing Committee of the Congress of Polish Culture.