Jerzy Kałucki

Jerzy Kałucki (1931, Lviv - 2022, Kraków) was a painter and stage designer, counted among the leading representatives of Polish geometric art. In 1951-1957 he studied painting and stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, under Zygmunt Radnicki and Andrzej Stopka among others. The beginnings of his creative work were connected with the theatre - until 1981 he designed stage sets for theatres and television; then, until 2003, he ran a painting studio at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznań (from 1991 as a full professor).

He began to exhibit his painting in 1959, and in 1976 he joined the reactivated Kraków Group, associated with the legendary Krzysztofory Gallery, where he had a dozen or so solo exhibitions. Often described as a „philosophical constructivist”, he readily invoked himself as a continuator of the painting initiated by Kazimir Malevich. His art, based on geometry and systemic reflection, sought to introduce order into the surrounding world.

A constant element of Kałucki's paintings is the circle, the arc and the ring - subordinated to a vertical axis of symmetry, but enlarged so that they never fit in their entirety within the field of the picture. This forces the viewer to imagine the invisible space of geometry, and thereby to reach the metaphysical sphere of the work. From 1970 he also developed realisations connected with space and installations (including „A Segment of an Arc with a Radius of r=1970 cm”). A laureate of the Jan Cybis Award (2005), he left behind work of unrivalled precision; his works are held, among others, in the National Museum in Kraków and MOCAK.