Tomasz Ciecierski

Tomasz Ciecierski (1945, Kraków - 2024) was a painter, draughtsman and author of collages, photomontages and relief-paintings - one of the most outstanding contemporary Polish artists. He received his diploma in 1971 in the studio of Professor Krystyna Łada-Studnicka at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and in 1972-1985 he was a lecturer there.

He worked out his own, instantly recognisable formula. He constructed paintings from many fragments of canvas and paper, turning them into patchwork structures and, in time, into layered „painterly installations” in which individual canvases overlapped and obscured one another. He juxtaposed formally different elements - from figuration to abstraction - and often combined painting with photography, treating this combination as a way of analysing and deconstructing painting itself. His works thus became a perverse and at the same time perceptive „treatise on painting”: a reflection on the meaning of art and the materiality of the image, now affirming the creative act, now ironic and close to conceptualism.

At the end of the 1980s the dominant motif became a conventionally treated landscape with a clearly marked horizon - a conceptual record of thought, sometimes composed of many micro-landscapes, like a collection of postcards from a journey. Drawing played an important role, appearing directly on the canvases; cycles such as „Alogical Paintings” and „Unphotographed Paintings” came into being. Although saturated with emotion and connected with numerous travels, these paintings were always born in the studio.

Ciecierski was one of the few Polish painters present at the most important world surveys: he took part in the Painting Festivals in Cagnes-sur-Mer (1982, 1984), the São Paulo Biennale (1987, 1994) and Documenta 9 in Kassel (1992). He was a scholar of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1981, 1983), and in 1999 he received the prestigious Jan Cybis Award. He collaborated with the Galeria Foksal in Warsaw, the Wetering Galerie in Amsterdam and the Galerie Hans Strelow in Düsseldorf; in his last years he conducted a painterly dialogue with Przemysław Matecki.

His works are in the collections of the National Museums in Łódź, Kraków, Poznań, Warsaw and Wrocław, of MOCAK in Kraków, the Zachęta in Warsaw and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Ciecierski's consistent, self-referential painting - asking ever anew what an image is - remains one of the most important points of reference in Polish art of the last half-century.