Jerzy NOWOSIELSKI (1923-2011), Abstraction, 1958

oil, canvas; 42 x 72 cm;
Signed and dated on back: Jerzy Nowosielski 1958;
On the reverse: landscape by Zofia Gutkowska-Nowosielski.
The painting is cataloged
in the archive of the Nowosielski Foundation.

PROVENANCE:
- Jerzy Nowosielski Foundation;
- Private collection, Poland.
- Purchase at auction at ANS AZURA (26.05.2022, cat. item 7);
- Private collection, Poland.

In an interview with Elżbieta Dzikowska, Nowosielski reports: "I was first introduced to modern art. I was 15 years old at the time, and I remember that thanks to a certain architect friend, an accomplishment took place
in me - in just an hour! - an opening to understand and, above all, to feel art. It was a wonderful feeling.
Soon after this extraordinary event I found myself in the Lviv museum of icons [...]". In the 1940s and 1950s, the painter remained
in the circle of influence of Tadeusz Kantor and the future Second Kraków Group. Among the artists associated with the Krakow environment
one can find analogies related to geometric abstraction framed in lyrical form. Thus, for example, the theme of triangular
objects in space commonly known as "funnels" appears in the works of Andrzej Wróblewski, Jerzy Tchórzewski
or precisely Jerzy Nowosielski from the late 1940s and early 1950s. At this stage of his work, Jerzy Nowosielski's abstract paintings still lack the characteristic bordering that separates the zone of the sacred, as happens in icons, but the very colors of the
of the work, the abandonment of texturality in the painting already refer to the painter's mature works, in which the emphasized element of sacrum (not to be confused with religiosity) can be found in numerous paintings. As
Roman Kaczkowski recalls, "For Nowosielski, even abstract paintings were icons, but not so much because of the form, but the intention itself, the idea inscribed in the artwork." For Jerzy Nowosielski, the 1940s and 1950s were a time of intensified creative work and
numerous artistic explorations. While the 2nd half of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s was a time of numerous exhibitions and flattering reviews of the presented achievements. Counting from 1956 - the declining stage of the Socialist Realist doctrine in Polish painting - Jerzy Nowosielski represented the country at the 1956 Venice Biennale
and the São Paulo Biennale in 1959. In 1960, his painting "The Cellist" was nominated for the Solomon Guggenheim Prize
in New York. In 1963, meanwhile, a large exhibition of the painter's works was organized at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw. "I paint out of necessity! When I don't know how to write something anymore, I don't know how to externalize it otherwise - well, I paint! Because painting begins where,
Where all other means of communication - from person to person - become powerless."
Jerzy Nowosielski
[for: The Straightest Way. Conversations with Artists.
Barbara Ziembicka, Krakow 1998, p. 28].