Jacek Sempoliński

Jacek Sempoliński (1927, Warsaw - 2012, Warsaw) was a painter, draughtsman, teacher and essayist - an abstractionist drawing on the tradition of Colourism, famous for his independence both from politics and from artistic fashions. He linked his whole professional life with the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied painting (under Jan Seweryn Sokołowski and Eugeniusz Eibisch), worked as a teacher and received the title of professor. He belonged to the Arsenał generation - he made his debut at the exhibition „Against War - Against Fascism” in 1955 - although he held his first solo exhibition only in 1960, at the Zachęta.

Sempoliński painted the same „subjects” obsessively, studying them and repeating them many times: landscapes, the face, and above all the skull and the Crucifixion - cycles touching on religion, culture and philosophy. From the end of the 1970s existential threads intensified in his painting, expressed through a darkened range of cold blues, violets and greys and through the physical destruction of his canvases: punctured, violently scored over, repeatedly repainted and overwritten on earlier pictures.

These programmatically anti-aesthetic works were not studies of anatomy but - as it was written - „a portrait of what happens beneath the skeleton”; the essence of the matter was evoked by colour and the trace of the tools, not by drawing, in a gesture almost Far-Eastern in its simplification. The artist himself maintained that it is not only the viewer who looks at the picture - the picture also „looks” at the viewer. During the martial-law period he was associated with the independent culture movement gathered around the Church. His oeuvre - over 800 canvases and thousands of drawings - was given the retrospective „A me stesso” at the Zachęta in Warsaw (2002).