Alfred Lenica

Alfred Lenica (1899–1977) was a painter, violinist and lawyer associated with the circles of Poznań, Kraków and Warsaw. From 1923 he trained at the Poznań Music Conservatory, and from 1925 he studied painting in the private studio of Adam Hannytkiewicz and Piotr Kubowicz. Endowed with perfect pitch, throughout his life he treated sound and colour as one: “My transition from music that fills time to painting silence in space was not sudden,” he said; “music made it easier for me to come to know colour and sound.”

In 1947, in Poznań, he co-founded the 4F+R group (form, paint, texture, fantasy + realism), together with Ildefons Houwalt and Feliks Maria Nowowiejski. At the turn of 1948 and 1949 he took part in the First Exhibition of Modern Art at the Palace of Art in Kraków — a landmark show curated by Mieczysław Porębski and arranged by Tadeusz Kantor.

“Paint in Motion” was created in 1949 — one of the earliest gestures of Tachisme on Polish soil, anticipating the flourishing of the current in the West. Lenica's Tachisme — the European counterpart of Abstract Expressionism — grew out of Surrealism; around 1955 the painter developed his own recognisable language based on a spreading, self-organising matter of paint.

In 1958, as one of the first after the easing of Socialist Realism, an exhibition of his avant-garde works was held at the Zachęta in Warsaw. Two years later he created a monumental mural for the UN headquarters in Geneva, “Three Elements: Love, Fire, Water” (Palais des Nations, 1960), and was awarded the Grand Prix at the international exhibition of contemporary art in Monte Carlo.

From 1965 he belonged to the Second Kraków Group, with which he was linked by five solo exhibitions at the Krzysztofory Gallery (1965, 1970, 1987, 1989 and 2015). In 1972 he visited Chile, where his guide was the Surrealist Roberto Matta; impressed by the events there, he created the polyptych “Chile, Chile” (1973). In 1974 the Zachęta devoted a second major exhibition to him, accompanied by a catalogue systematising the painter's oeuvre.

Recognised in Poland and abroad, Lenica remains perhaps the only Polish artist who fully entered the great synaesthetic experiment of his era — a painting in which colour is heard and silence is painted. His work returns from time to time with renewed force, today read ever more often through the lens of neuroaesthetics — as a chapter whose full measure the history of art has yet to take.