Stefan Gierowski

Stefan Gierowski was born in Częstochowa, Poland, in 1925. He is one of the key representatives of the Polish abstraction movement after the war. He studied at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts in 1945-1948 in the studio of expressionist Zbigniew Pronaszko and Karol Frycz, theater director and decorator. In 1949 he settled in Warsaw. Between 1956 and 1961, he collaborated with the Krzywe Koło gallery, owned by the artist Marian Bogusz. There he made two individual exhibitions, in 1957 and 1959. In 1962 he became professor of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he would teach until 1996. Between 1975 and 1981 he was dean of the faculty of painting. In 1957 he abandons figuration in favor of informal art, but in an original way. If the "informal" is generally a means for painters to give free rein to the deepest parts of their psyche and express them, Gierowski reverses the process: he tries to produce paintings that eliminate the distance between the spectators and the emotion they feel in the see the picture. In 1959, his work evolves significantly: the distinction between figure and earth is reduced, in the name of a unity that clearly must be associated with Władystaw Strzemiński, whom Gierowski meets in 1949. His work takes a turn that the makes it unique in the international panorama of abstraction of that period. The line becomes the central element of the painting, centered on dynamism, light and space. At the end of the decade, color is at the center of his artistic research. His paintings become more meditative. Gierowski's work followed a completely unclassifiable direction with respect to the canon of modernity. His work mixed different aesthetics, from op art to color field, passing through scientific iconography, but without ever losing its original characteristics. Gierowski's works were exhibited in France from 1959, at the Biennale of young artists in Paris, then in 1961 and 1965 at the Lacloche gallery in Paris. Gierowski participated in the Fifteen Polish Painters exhibition at the MOMA in New York in 1961 and in the International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at the Carnegie Institute in Pitsburgh in 1964. In 1967, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw held an important exhibition of his works of the previous six years. Gierowski's work was featured in various exhibitions related to the Polish scene (the Venice Biennale in 1968, the Caracas Museum of Modern Art in 1974 and the Mexico City Museum of Modern Art in 1975). In 2000, Zachęta and the Poznań National Museum organized monographic exhibitions dedicated to him. Since 2014, the Stefan Gierowski Foundation in Warsaw has been spreading knowledge of his work and promoting it.