Zbigniew Gostomski

Zbigniew Gostomski (1932, Bydgoszcz - 2017) was a painter, creator of artistic experiments, photographer and teacher - a figure belonging to the canon of the Polish avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1953-1959 he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he defended his diploma in the studio of Michał Bylina, and then obtained a specialisation in the artistic textile studio. He linked his teaching activity with his alma mater - in 1988 he received the title of professor.

In 1966 he was a co-founder and the interior designer of the Galeria Foksal in Warsaw, with which he remained associated until the end of his life. A year earlier he had taken part in Tadeusz Kantor's first happening „Cricotage” (1965), which began their close collaboration; for over twenty years Gostomski was an actor in the Cricot 2 Theatre run by Kantor.

In his work he represented a rationalist attitude, although the fruits of his work have a sensual character. At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s he created „Optical Objects” - geometric compositions built from black and white of an even gradation, some of which received three-dimensional counterparts in the form of steel reliefs. In 1967, with the work „Environment”, he filled the space of the Galeria Foksal with his great frame, turning it into a picture inside which the viewer found himself. The artist's imagination was stirred by the themes of ideal geometric figures, utopian architecture and images of the infinity of time and space; he established his art in borderland territories, where the exact sciences - especially algebra and geometry - pass imperceptibly into alchemy and metaphysics.

His most important work remains „It Begins in Wrocław” (1970), created for the historic Wrocław '70 Visual Arts Symposium and regarded by critics as one of the most important Polish statements in conceptual art. It was a realisation infinite by design and probably impossible to realise - what counted in it was the concept itself, with which the artist aimed his irony at the idea of creating works in public space within official events. In the same year he received the C.K. Norwid Art Criticism Award. Gostomski had over 30 solo exhibitions - most of them at the Galeria Foksal - and his retrospective „The State of Things” was held in 1994 at the Museum of Art in Łódź. In September 2011 it was precisely his exhibition „It Begins in Wrocław” that inaugurated the activity of the Wrocław Contemporary Museum.