Henryk Stażewski

Henryk Stażewski (1894, Warsaw - 1988, Warsaw) was a pioneer and doyen of the Polish avant-garde, a leading representative of Constructivism and geometric abstraction, and also an art theorist, interior designer, stage designer and poster artist. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1913-1919, under Stanisław Lentz) and already in the interwar period found himself at the very centre of the avant-garde: he co-created the Blok, Praesens and a.r. groups, edited their magazines and belonged to the Paris groupings Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création. Together with Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński he co-created the International Collection of Modern Art at the Museum of Art in Łódź.

After the Second World War Stażewski played a leading role in artistic life - in 1966 he co-founded, with Tadeusz Kantor and Edward Krasiński among others, the Galeria Foksal in Warsaw, becoming for the neo-avant-garde a living link with the old, authentic avant-garde. He strove for a wholly objective, universal and disciplined art, believing - like other geometric artists - that art, on the model of science, should investigate the fundamental principles of reality.

Although he began to construct his first reliefs only after the age of sixty, it is they that became his hallmark: transcending the traditionally understood picture, he built compositions from a single repeated element - most often the square - arranging the colours in sequences resembling colorimetric tables. He passed through a „white period”, and then experimented with copper, aluminium, Plexiglas, fluorescent paints and the raster, creating among others the cycle „Reductions”. His works are in the most important collections in Poland and abroad, including the Museum of Art in Łódź and the Centre Pompidou.