Henryk Musiałowicz

Henryk Musiałowicz (1914-2015) was a painter, graphic artist and draughtsman, deliberately remaining outside all artistic groups and orientations. He trained first at the State School of Decorative Arts in Poznań (decorative painting and stained glass), and then at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, where in 1948 he received his diploma in the studio of Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski. A breakthrough experience was his trip to the Netherlands in 1957 and his direct encounter with the art of Rembrandt, which directed him towards a lapidary form expressed almost exclusively in black and white.

Musiałowicz's work consists of monothematic cycles of a deeply existential character, marked by the memory of war - „War Against Man”, „Portraits from the Imagination”, „Reminiscences”, „Epitaphs”, „Family”. A recurring motif is the nameless figure-shadow, emerging from a layered, tarry blackness that absorbs other colours; pictures of a dense, relief texture which the artist inlaid with embedded filings of gold and silver, achieving an atmosphere of „joyful melancholy” and contemplation. From the end of the 1980s he increasingly created spatial compositions built from numerous, wood-carved elements resembling totems.

It was precisely with the cycles „Reminiscences”, „Epitaphs” and „Family” that Musiałowicz achieved success in Europe; he took part in about 250 exhibitions in Poland and abroad, including in Geneva, Paris (Galerie Lambert), London, Chicago and New York, as well as at the Zachęta in Warsaw. In 2002 the National Museum in Poznań prepared a large retrospective exhibition of his work, and in 2009 the artist was decorated with the Gold Medal „Meritorious to Culture - Gloria Artis”.