Marek Piasecki

Marek Piasecki (1935, Warsaw - 2011, Lund) was a photographer, photojournalist, painter and sculptor - one of the most original Polish artists of the second half of the 20th century. From 1945 he lived in Kraków, where he studied art history at the Jagiellonian University and quickly made contacts with the artists of the Second Kraków Group - Jonasz Stern and Maria Jarema; he became its member in 1957/58. A friend of Miron Białoszewski, he documented his theatrical experiments, and as a photojournalist of „Tygodnik Powszechny” (1958-1962) and a sensitive portraitist he immortalised his milieu, including Nikifor, Beksiński and Lewczyński.

Piasecki's work is situated on the borderland of painting, graphic art and photography, showing links with pre-war Surrealism and the neo-Dadaism of the 1960s. In 1955 he created his first heliographs - photograms made without a camera, by arranging objects directly on light-sensitive paper (in the technique proposed by Man Ray), in which he worked out a fully original style. In parallel he created „miniatures” - works in a mixed technique combining photography, heliography and graphic art - which are an interesting example of the creative reception of Informel and matter painting in another medium.

A separate chapter of his art is constituted by assemblages and spatial objects - photographs of dolls enclosed in characteristic boxes, compared to the „boxes” of Joseph Cornell. In 1967 the artist settled permanently in Lund in southern Sweden. His works are held, among others, in the collections of the National Museums in Warsaw, Wrocław and Kraków, the Museum of Art in Łódź and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm; the cross-sectional retrospective „Fragile” was prepared by the Zachęta and the National Museum in Wrocław.