Jerzy Nowosielski

We prepared the exhibition of Jerzy Nowosielski’s paintings in cooperation with the Nowosielski Foundation and Starmach Gallery, the leading institutions supporting and promoting the artist’s work in Poland and abroad. The exhibition presents oil paintings made between 1948 and 1996, selected for the Łódź presentation by Agata Mendrychowska. Twelve of them date from 1950–1962, the period when the artist lived in Łódź. Today, Jerzy Nowosielski is associated with Kraków, and few people know that he and his wife Zofia spent just over twelve years in Łódź. The Nowosielskis arrived from Kraków in April 1950, like many others at the time, hoping for a better life in a city that then served as the country’s cultural centre. In the interview published in this catalogue, Professor Stanisław Fijałkowski recalls those years: “Many artists, especially young ones, lived in poverty and took on all manner of work simply to get by. Zosia and Jurek Nowosielski, as indeed I did, designed sets for puppet theatres.” From 1957 to 1962, Jerzy Nowosielski taught at the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Łódź (now the Academy of Fine Arts). In 1956, the celebrated Exhibition of Eight, now legendary in Łódź, was held at the city’s Art Propaganda Centre. It drew enormous crowds — 12,500 visitors saw it in July — and among the works by the “eight modernists” were pieces by two friends, then in their thirties: Jerzy Nowosielski and Stanisław Fijałkowski. The catalogue accompanying the artist’s exhibition at Atlas Sztuki includes an interview with Professor Stanisław Fijałkowski, who, more than half a century later, remembers Jerzy Nowosielski as an outstanding artist, a man of faith who was nevertheless acutely aware of human imperfection and sinfulness: “Jurek was both sinful and holy.” Many important events in Nowosielski’s life occurred during his years in Łódź. He held his first solo exhibition, represented Poland at the Venice Biennale in 1956 and, three years later, at the São Paulo Art Biennial. Even so, in the autumn of 1962 the Nowosielskis returned to Kraków. Professor Fijałkowski discusses some of the reasons for Jerzy Nowosielski’s departure from Łódź in the interview mentioned above.

Agata Mendrychowska writes about the Łódź period in Jerzy Nowosielski’s life. In her essay, she examines the artist’s twelve years in the city, drawing our attention, among other things, to his relationship with the local artistic community and discussing his work in its social and political context. In presenting Jerzy Nowosielski’s art in Łódź, it is important to recall the period of his activity in our city.

I also recommend an engaging essay by Andrzej Szczepaniak, an art historian and curator associated with Starmach Gallery in Kraków, who analyses the motif of Mediterranean beaches in Jerzy Nowosielski’s work. He draws attention to the fact that “there is a powerful sacred element in Nowosielski’s beaches and girls by the sea. The beaches become a theatrical spectacle, a contemporary mystery play of sorts in which the woman assumes the leading role. Here we encounter another echo of icon painting, whose principles for organising multi-figure compositions were developed from the experience of ancient theatre. At times, the figures of naked or semi-naked women on the beach in his paintings become increasingly slender. By reducing the physical reality of the body, they seem to transfer its form to another plane. Enclosed by their contours, they became beings from another world and, in a sense, more perfect, because they sought to capture an ideal image of woman rather than a particular model. In short, by rendering the imagined scene unreal, Nowosielski showed his dream of Eve remembered from Paradise — the woman for whom he yearned and to whom he continually returned. He transferred her from material reality into a surreal realm.” I am delighted that the exhibition of Jerzy Nowosielski’s work at Atlas Sztuki is accompanied by the new perspective and fresh interpretation proposed by Andrzej Szczepaniak in his essay.

The exhibition will show more than Jerzy Nowosielski’s beaches and bathers. I invite everyone interested in his work to Atlas Sztuki.