Tadeusz Brzozowski

Tadeusz Brzozowski (1918, Lviv - 1987, Rome) was a painter, draughtsman, stage designer and teacher - and one of the most colourful personalities of the Kraków artistic milieu. He began his studies in 1936 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, continued them at the occupation-era Kunstgewerbeschule and completed them in 1945. At the same time he was an actor in Tadeusz Kantor's underground theatre and worked in the conservation of works of art - an experience that proved invaluable for his later, virtuoso painting technique.

He was one of the animators of the Group of Young Visual Artists, from which the Second Kraków Group grew - a formation reactivated in 1957, of which he remained a member; from 1959, in Paris, he became associated with the international „Phases” movement. In the years of Socialist Realism (1950-1955) he withdrew from official artistic life, painting church polychromes and teaching. In 1954 he moved to Zakopane, where he lived until the end of his life and for years headed the local Kenar School; later he was a professor at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznań and the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts.

His painting evolved from figuration inspired by Surrealism - with its characteristic grotesque and bitter-ironic aura - towards defiguration and Informel around 1960. The most essential became matter itself: the ragged patch of intense colour and the angular, spasmodic line, building dramatic tension. In the 1970s the existential mood and irony gave way to eschatology and the sphere of the sacred. A separate trademark of Brzozowski's were his titles - archaic, sonorous, drawn from old Polish („Pludry”, „Łazarz”, „Kostki”, „Pręty”) - with which he labelled his canvases with his characteristic, mocking distance towards his own oeuvre.

In the 1960s, at the height of his powers, he was counted among the European leaders of modern painting and exhibited at events of the highest rank: at the São Paulo Biennale (1959, solo in 1975), the Venice Biennale (1962, solo), the World's Fair in Seattle (1962) and ROSC in Dublin (1967). In total his works were shown at over 500 group and 80 solo exhibitions. A perfect craft, an inimitable matter and existential depth make Brzozowski one of the most outstanding - and most distinct - painters of the Polish post-war avant-garde.