Untitled

Jan Ziemski belonged to the Lublin artistic milieu. With his participation, in 1956, the local artistic group „Zamek” began to form. It included both artists - among them Włodzimierz Borowski, Tytus Dzieduszycki and Ryszard Kiwerski - and art critics - Jerzy Ludwiński and Hanna Ptaszkowska. A year later, during the third joint exhibition, the artists published the group's principles, which can be reduced to the perfecting of the visual form and the conduct of intensive research into its development. After the years of Stalinism and the reigning doctrine of Socialist Realist painting, which resulted in absolute isolation from world progress in the visual arts, this manifesto ceases to be a trivial declaration. The year 1956 is an exceptionally important moment in Jan Ziemski's individual work. It was then that the artist began work on the Cosmic Series, with which he directed the art he practised towards an abstract form of artistic statement. From 1958 he worked on the cycle of reliefs Formury. The artist develops the emerging question of space and of the forming of matter in the light of the analytical sciences - mathematics and physics. In 1965 he was invited to take part in the Złote Grono symposium in Zielona Góra. During the train journey he made then, he observed a fleeting optical phenomenon of two rhythms overlapping. This accidental image ultimately shaped the form of the reliefs generating movement in space, which today enjoy the recognition of collectors. Bożena Kowalska vividly characterises the means used and the effect that was Jan Ziemski's aim: „These were already those […] square pictorial surfaces on which he fixed, in flat relief, rhythmically arranged and arcuately bent strips. He then fixed, in an analogous rhythm, strips rising in a convex arc above the relief ground. In this way two rhythms of semicircles overlap, when one moves past them, evoking the phenomenon of a peculiar interference, of the flight of a non-existent and undefined form.” The effect obtained also fulfilled the idea on which Jan Ziemski was working, concerning the problem of „vanishing images”. Its fulfilment was the form presented in 1969 during the 4th Złote Grono Symposium in Zielona Góra.