Jan Tarasin

Jan Tarasin (1926, Kalisz — 2009, Warsaw) graduated in 1951 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków — painting under Zygmunt Radnicki, Wacław Taranczewski and Zbigniew Pronaszko, printmaking under Andrzej Jurkiewicz and Konrad Srzednicki. While still a second-year student he was invited to the First Exhibition of Modern Art in Kraków (1948/1949) — a landmark show closed shortly after its opening with the proclamation of the Socialist Realist doctrine.

In the second half of the 1950s he began to paint “objects” — or rather their allegories: abstract models of things and of zoo- and anthropomorphic forms that had the character of signs. Thus his hallmark was born: he painted objects that are not objects, and letters that are not letters, building from them his own alphabet, awaiting to be read by the viewer.

The breakthrough came in 1962. Tarasin joined the Kraków Group and — on a scholarship — made a journey to China and Vietnam. His fascination with Far Eastern calligraphy and pictographic writing permanently transformed his painting: he began to “record” reality in sequences and rhythms of signs scattered across a light ground, cut through by rows of lines. The recurring titles — “Records”, “Objects”, “Elements”, “Signs” — indicated that the true subject had become the very semantics of the image.

He was recognised early and consistently: for the cycle of lithographs “Home” at the Warsaw Arsenal (1955), with first prize at the First Print Biennale in Kraków (1960), and finally with the prize of the “Yomiuri” newspaper at the international exhibition of young artists in Tokyo (1964). In 1967 he moved to Warsaw, where he took over a painting studio at the local Academy of Fine Arts, and from 1974 to 1982 he published his own “Notebooks” with serigraphs and his own texts. He received the C.K. Norwid Award for the best exhibition of the year and the Jan Cybis Award (1984), in 1985 the title of professor, and from 1987 to 1990 served as rector of the Warsaw Academy.

In 1995 his retrospective was shown simultaneously by the Zachęta in Warsaw and the National Museum in Wrocław, and in 2007 his most recent works — by the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle. His works are held, among others, at the National Museums in Kraków, Warsaw and Wrocław. Consistent for more than half a century, and at the same time eluding simple classifications, Tarasin remains one of the most original “writers of the image” in Polish art — an artist who all his life sensed a hidden order in the chaos of the world.