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Jerzy Nowosielski
Jerzy Nowosielski called painting a messenger from another dimension.
He said that art appears where other means fail, when one cannot express one's feelings and intentions in any other way. The painter did not subscribe to the avant-gardes, did not revolutionize, did not create a canon. On the contrary, he used a traditional repertoire of forms and means. Sensing that Polish art is played out between East and West, he assimilated the heritage of Orthodoxy, and at the same time the influence of Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism and geometric abstraction.
If we tried to classify his work, we would have to conclude that he was an icon painter, even when he painted secular paintings. He took his aesthetics from icons - orderliness, simplicity and unambiguity. His figures are hieratic, painted sparingly, almost conventionally, without anatomical observation. On the other hand, they constitute an iconic negative through the absence of faces, eyes and conventionality of hands. All attention is directed to the body.
Nowosielski's paintings are to some extent dark and infernal, containing deep sadness. Perhaps this is due to the artist's traumatic experiences during the war, when the first naked bodies viewed were corpses.
Jerzy Nowosielski (1923-2011) was born in Krakow. His father was a Lemko of the Greek Catholic rite.
In 1940, he began studying at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule. For four months, he learned icon-writing in a Uniate monastery near Lviv. After the war, he took up studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. For a short time he was an assistant to Tadeusz Kantor. In 1950, he and his wife left for Lodz, where he became the artistic director of the State Directorate of Puppet Theaters, and from 1957 a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts, teaching decorative textile design and painting.
In 1961 he returned to Cracow and became professionally associated with the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts. He represented Poland at the Venice and São Paulo biennales.
Katarzyna Haber
Graduate of art history at the University of Warsaw, scholarship holder of ICOMOS IFLA University of York, lecturer at WSEiZ, curator of Kordegarda Gallery of the National Cultural Center, curator of Art Pharmacy Gallery, organizer of WarsawByArt Gallery Festival, curator and coordinator of about 200 exhibitions (including J. Czapski in curatorial cooperation with E. Skoczek, C. Norwid, B. Schulz and L. Cranach, J. Halas, A. Strumillo, etc., Z. Herbert), author of articles on art (including PAU PAN, Contexts, catalogs, NCK catalogs including “Sztukmistrz” awarded the Phoenix Prize 2022), screenwriter for TVP, cartoonist and illustrator (including Miłosz, Warsaw 2024).