Jerzy Kujawski (1921-1998), Composition, 1961

oil, paper pasted on canvas, 50.5 x 100 cm, signed p.d.; 'Kujawski' and on the reverse: 'KUJAWSKI JERZY | 1961. | 100 X 50.5'.



Displaced from Greater Poland during the war, he lived alternately in Warsaw and Krakow. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. After the end of the war, he settled in Paris, where he established contacts with the Parisian avant-garde, above all with André Breton. In 1947, he participated in the famous international exhibition of Surrealism at the Maeght Gallery in Paris.
From the end of 1949 until the second half of the 1950s, he worked in the trend of gestural abstraction. In his paintings he challenged the principles of figural composition, emphasizing chance, automatism, free arrangement of forms and colors and uncontrolled expression. In 1957, he had his first solo exhibition in Poland at the Krzywe Koło gallery in Warsaw, where he presented a series of paintings maintained in the Informel aesthetic.

In the early 1960s, his work focused primarily on matter painting. In the second half of this decade, the artist abandoned abstraction and turned again to figuration, but filtered through the iconosphere of the media world. He looked for inspiration in the contemporary environment and in motifs taken from mass culture. He increasingly turned to monotype, decal and serigraphy - techniques used by artists associated with pop art. This current of art, in various variants, close to the art of the late 20th century, dominated his oeuvre until his last works created in the 1990s.