Józef Hałas

Józef Hałas (1927, Nowy Sącz — 2015, Wrocław) came to Wrocław in 1949 and enrolled at the State Higher School of Fine Arts, where in 1954 he completed his diploma in the studio of Eugeniusz Geppert. He bound his entire life to his alma mater — he was its teacher for many years and for a long time headed the Department of Painting and Drawing.

He belonged to the Arsenal generation (1955) and became one of the pillars of the Wrocław school of painting. In 1956 he co-founded Group X — together with Alfons Mazurkiewicz, Małgorzata Grabowska and Krzesława Maliszewska — and from 1961 he belonged to the Wrocław School, known from 1967 as the Wrocław Group. His influence on the style of this milieu was immense; he remained a master for successive generations of painters.

From 1962 the main subject of his painting became landscape — above all the mountains and hills of his native Nowy Sącz region. Hałas consistently synthesised and ordered shapes, reducing the landscape to irregular geometric figures, until form became an abstract sign — a sublime object of contemplation. He usually organised the painting by a horizontal division into sky and earth, supplemented by verticals, diagonals and the play of pure colour.

Matter was as important as form. He built the landscape from structural, deliberately shaped layers of paint, and raised colour — ranges of blues, greens and greys — to the rank of subject. He enclosed these explorations in cycles: Figures, Mountains, Interiors, Oppositions, Verticals–Diagonals, creating, alongside oil paintings, also gouaches and drawings.

From his first solo exhibition in 1955 he showed his work at more than three hundred exhibitions at home and abroad. He won the Grand Prix of the Festival of Contemporary Painting in Szczecin (1966), and in 2006 — the Gloria Artis Gold Medal. The fortieth anniversary of his work was honoured with a retrospective by the National Museum in Wrocław (1994), and in 2005 a show at the Zachęta in Warsaw inscribed him — in the words of its director Agnieszka Morawińska — among the classics of the twentieth century, beside Fijałkowski, Nowosielski and Gierowski. Hałas's disciplined, consistent painting remains one of the pillars of Polish post-war abstraction.