Jerzy Kujawski

Jerzy Kujawski (1921, Ostrów Wielkopolski - 1998, Paris) was a Polish painter who spent most of his life in France. He survived the war years living alternately in Kraków and Warsaw; in Kraków he studied painting and belonged to the circle of young artists from which the Kraków Group later emerged (Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Nowosielski, Mieczysław Porębski), and he was also friends with Marian Bogusz and Tadeusz Brzozowski. Already then he was regarded as an adherent of Surrealism; he created the first underground theatre, later run by Kantor. In 1945, after the Warsaw Uprising, he left permanently for Paris.

He quickly made contacts with the Paris avant-garde, and after André Breton's return from New York he found himself among his companions. In 1947 he exhibited at the famous international Surrealism exhibition at the Maeght Gallery. His art of the second half of the 1940s is Surrealist painting, graphic art and drawing playing out on the border of reality and dream, full of organic, imaginative forms. From the end of 1949, until the second half of the 1950s, Kujawski was a creator of gestural abstraction - he undermined the principles of figural composition, placing the emphasis on chance, automatism and uncontrolled expression.

Associated with the Galerie Flinker in Paris and with Édouard Jaguer's international avant-garde movement „Phases”, whose ideas - like Breton's thought - he transferred to Polish ground. In 1957 he had his first solo exhibition in Poland, at the Krzywe Koło Gallery in Warsaw, and took part in the awarded presentation at the 2nd Exhibition of Modern Art at the Zachęta. In the 1970s he stopped exhibiting and created for a narrow circle. His oeuvre was recalled by the retrospective exhibition „Maranatha” at the National Museum in Poznań (2005).