Stefan Gierowski

Stefan Gierowski (1925, Częstochowa - 2022) was a painter, draughtsman and teacher - an outstanding representative of the post-war avant-garde, described as a „classic of Polish modernity”. He spent his childhood in Kielce, and in 1945-1948 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, in the studios of Zbigniew Pronaszko and Karol Frycz among others; in parallel he studied art history at the Jagiellonian University. He was a thoroughly educated man, with a musical education as well.

He made his debut in 1955 at the legendary National Exhibition of Young Art „Against War, Against Fascism” at the Arsenał in Warsaw, where his work „I Love Life” received the Second Prize, bringing him recognition as a painter of the new generation. In 1957-1961 he was associated with the Krzywe Koło Gallery in Warsaw.

At first he painted figurative pictures, with a visible inspiration from Cubism and a striving to simplify the composition. Around 1957, however, he developed his characteristic abstract style, based on explorations of colour: almost monochrome canvases broken by the dominant of a single intense colour, from which he eliminated elements of figuration. It was then too that he abandoned literary titles and consistently marked his works with Roman numerals - „Painting I”, „Painting II” and so on. The breakthrough was the presentation of the „Paintings” cycle at the 2nd Exhibition of Modern Art (1957), written about by Julian Przyboś and Zbigniew Herbert among others. From the 1960s the artist was inspired by op-art and optical illusion, in the 1970s he set large planes of different tonalities against one another, and in his later pictures he used only basic geometric forms and ever bolder colour. His painting bears traces of Informel, of Władysław Strzemiński's Unism and of post-Constructivism, yet eludes any unambiguous classification.

For 35 years, in the period 1961-1996, Gierowski was a lecturer and, from 1976, a professor of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, educating successive generations of painters. He took part in nearly 200 group and several dozen solo exhibitions in Poland and abroad - including the 5th São Paulo Biennale (1959), the 34th Venice Biennale (1968), the San Marino Biennale (gold medal, 1965) and the 1st Triennale of Art in New Delhi (1968). He was a laureate of the Jan Cybis Award, and his works are in the most important museum collections in Poland. Consistent for over half a century, Gierowski remains one of the pillars of Polish abstraction - a painter for whom colour and light were the true material of the image.