Artysta
Jerzy Nowosielski
Biografia
„All painting is for me an icon”. Jerzy Nowosielski - one of the most important Polish painters of the 20th century - achieved a synthesis of the avant-garde and the Byzantine tradition of the icon, combining abstraction, the nude and the sacred.
Jerzy Nowosielski (1923, Kraków - 2011, Kraków) was one of the most important and most recognisable Polish artists of the 20th century - a painter, stage designer, creator of murals and a theorist of contemporary art and Orthodox theology. Brought up at the meeting point of cultures, in the Greek-Catholic-Orthodox tradition, he began his studies in 1940 at the Kraków Kunstgewerbeschule, and in 1942 he spent nearly a year in the Orthodox community at the Studite lavra in Univ near Lviv, where he studied the theory and the art of icon painting - as he recalled, „it was there that he was born spiritually”. After the war he trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (under the influence of Tadeusz Kantor among others), receiving his diploma in 1947.
In 1957 Nowosielski was a founding member of the Kraków Group Artistic Association; in 1957-1962 he taught at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Łódź, and from 1962 to 1993 he ran a studio at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, enjoying enormous authority among students. In his work - as he himself said - „two currents live and struggle with each other: figuration and geometric abstraction”, and his fascination with the icon arose precisely from this opposition, which the icon was able to reconcile in a painterly synthesis. The heroine of many of his paintings is the woman - nudes, figures of sportswomen and gymnasts in surprising perspectives, women-icons, interiors, landscapes and nudes on the beach.
A significant place in his art is occupied by abstraction - the core of his reflection on the picture as a carrier of an idea - and by sacred painting: numerous polychromes and iconostases in Orthodox and Catholic churches throughout Poland. He was also the author of essays on the icon and on Orthodoxy. He took part in the Venice and São Paulo Biennales and in exhibitions in New York, Paris, London and Vienna; he received, among others, the State Award (1984) and the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. The Polish Sejm declared 2023 the Year of Jerzy Nowosielski.