Leon Tarasewicz

Leon Tarasewicz (b. 1957 in the village of Waliły in Podlasie) is one of the most important contemporary Polish painters and one of the few enjoying world renown. He emphasises his Belarusian roots and his connection with the Belarusian minority; to this day he lives and works in his native Waliły, drawing on the ethnic, religious and cultural diversity of Podlasie. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (diploma 1984 in the studio of Tadeusz Dominik), where from 1996 he has run a Guest Painting Studio; he made his debut at the Galeria Foksal in 1984, which opened his way to a European audience.

From 1988 Tarasewicz moved beyond concrete object references towards purely painterly values - colour, texture, the play of values - creating abstract compositions of fields and bands of colour. In time his painting simplified itself all the way to a „play of pure colours” and an „art of the eye”; it is abstract, atextual and without titles, because - as the artist maintains - art is meant to act on the emotions and need not carry concrete content. He increasingly transgressed the boundaries of the stretcher, covering walls, floors and pillars with colour - creating monumental painterly installations that the viewer can physically enter.

The apogee of this tendency fell at the turn of the century: as part of „Aperto '88”, and then representing Poland at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), he covered the entire floor of the Polish pavilion with painting, and in 2003 he turned the interiors of the Warsaw Centre for Contemporary Art into a picture. He also realised works in public space, including on the Plaza Real in Barcelona, on the façade of the Grand Theatre in Poznań and at the National Museum in Kraków. He collaborates with galleries in Poland and abroad (including Foksal, Springer & Winckler in Berlin, Nordenhake in Stockholm).