Władysław Hasior

Władysław Hasior (1928, Nowy Sącz - 1999, Kraków) was a sculptor, stage designer, creator of monuments and ephemeral actions, and a photographer - a pioneer of assemblage in Poland. Associated all his life with Zakopane, he began his education at the local secondary school of fine arts under Antoni Kenar, and then studied at the Faculty of Sculpture of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, under Marian Wnuk, Oskar Hansen and Jerzy Sołtan among others. Thanks to a French government scholarship (1959) he travelled around Europe and trained in the Paris studio of Ossip Zadkine.

At the end of the 1950s his individual attitude took shape and his first assemblages came into being - composed both of found objects and of sculpted elements. Monumental compositions making use of the „worn-out props of everyday life” and of textile led the critics to hail him as „the Polish Rauschenberg”. In time he worked out his characteristic, flat formula referring to the icon and the processional shrine; from 1960 he created expressive cements cast in the earth, and in 1961 his most famous work, with a fire-heart burning inside, came into being - „St Sebastian”. From the mid-1960s he composed „banners” - sheets of fabric mocking the pomposity of historical standards.

Hasior took part in the São Paulo Biennale (1965, 1971), and his monumental exhibition at the Zachęta in Warsaw (1966) was praised for its theatrical effects and play with light. In 1985 the author's own Władysław Hasior Gallery (a branch of the Tatra Museum) was opened in Zakopane, to which the artist bequeathed his entire legacy. His works are held, among others, in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the National Museums in Kraków, Warsaw, Poznań and Wrocław. Archetypal narratives drawing on folk culture make Hasior one of the most distinct creators of 20th-century Polish art.