Leszek Nowosielski

Leszek Nowosielski (1918, Warsaw - 1999, Warsaw) was a ceramic artist, painter and draughtsman - a distinct figure, unrelated to Jerzy Nowosielski. He completed his studies at the Faculty of Chemistry of the Warsaw University of Technology, and learned painting during the war privately under Jan Rubczak. In 1945-1949 he ran a chemical works in Gliwice, and in 1949 - after being admitted to the Union of Polish Visual Artists - his first solo exhibition of painting was held.

In 1956, after buying with his wife Hanna Modrzewska-Nowosielska a villa in Podkowa Leśna, he directed his interests towards ceramics; they began with overglaze decorations on porcelain, according to an independently worked-out technology and stylistics. In time Nowosielski specialised in compositions of bas-relief ceramic tiles. The most important elements of his art were texture and chiaroscuro - in his paintings revealing themselves as thick, impasto layers of paint, and in his ceramics as a rich, varied relief; he drew his inspiration from nature, creating organic, pulsating, abstract forms.

Leszek and Hanna Nowosielski formed a remarkable, creatively complementary artistic duo, and their property in Podkowa Leśna - with its studio, ceramic kiln and gallery open to the garden - became a work in itself. Part of his work referred to the history of Poland, and one of his ceramic compositions he dedicated to the explosion of the bomb in Hiroshima (the work is in the Hiroshima Memorial Centre in Tokyo). His works are in the collections of the National Museums in Warsaw, Wrocław and Gdańsk and the Museum of the Mazovian Land in Płock.