Head [Male Portrait]

Jerzy Nowosielski is counted among the most interesting artists of the 20th century, and his paintings among the most recognisable. This artist associated with the Kraków milieu was also a long-time teacher at the local Academy of Fine Arts, but above all an erudite with broad horizons. Raised at the meeting point of two religions at a time when the artistic milieu of the Polish avant-garde was taking shape, he developed his own painterly language based on elements characterising Eastern icons. Jerzy Nowosielski's artistic successes, which fell in the 1960s, coincided with the formulation of the canon taken up by the painter and the broadly understood theme of the sacred. His two-dimensional works, with clearly marked drawing, with the protagonists of the canvases deprived of distinctive features, and with their manner of framing the composition - in the case of portraits almost entirely filling the canvas - acquired a hieratic distinction and dignity, but not haughtiness. Through these devices Jerzy Nowosielski achieved a unified model, a pantheon of personal sacrum.