Landscape

Jerzy Tchórzewski came from the Kraków artistic milieu. His works were presented there for the first time in 1948. This happened during the 1st Exhibition of Modern Art, which was quickly closed as a result of the new policy taking shape at the end of the 1940s. The exhibition was also attended by Alfred Lenica, Tadeusz Brzozowski and Kazimierz Mikulski. The work of all four painters, though at various stages of it, is linked by the use of an aesthetic close to French Surrealism. In the case of Jerzy Tchórzewski's painting, the impression of the oneiric or lyrical quality of the composition also accompanies him in the following years of his artistic activity. The poetics of space, visualised by means of abstract but also energetic - energy-charged - clashing forms, plays an important role in the artist's works. His paintings and his artistic attitude are compared to demiurgic acts such as the calling of new life from the inanimate matter of the painting, or the symbolic process of kindling the element of fire from two dry logs, which are identified - one with the artist, the other with the matter of the painting just begun. Jerzy Tchórzewski's artistic sensibility is not enclosed solely within „pictorial” frames. The artist valued contemporary poetry and maintained relations with the literary milieu of the time thanks to his friendship with Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Różewicz. This lively exchange of thought, alertness, sensibility and the emotionality of the author himself mean that the painter's canvases also touch on existential and eschatological aspects.