Sewn Painting - Black, from the series: Equivalent Systems

Situating Kajetan Sosnowski's art on the axis of its history and describing it briefly in a single word - what art historians call a current - is a complicated matter, because his work escapes typical artistic conventions. Oscillating on the border of abstract tendencies, conceptual art, and a strict scientific approach based on mathematics, physics and chemistry, one can at the same time find in his works a lyrical, intimate or symbolic tone. This unusual multi-threadedness, but at the same time its intellectual value, was perceived by the Italian artistic milieu. In 1971, at the LP220 gallery in Turin, an exhibition of three Polish artists - Kajetan Sosnowski, Roman Opałka and Jerzy Rosołowicz - was organised; in the artistic output of all three one can perceive a dominant conceptual thought and a correlation between the world of art and science. The successive limitation of painterly means led to the creation of the cycles of sewn paintings „Katalipomena” and „Equivalent Systems”. From 1978 Kajetan Sosnowski created „Equivalent Systems”, and it is into this series of works that the „Black Paintings” are inscribed, which arose in 1982-1984. It is worth setting them too in the current socio-political moment - suffice it to recall that 1981-1983 was the period of martial law. The emotional canvases, devoid of a painterly layer, consist of linen or cotton elements sewn together, with a varying dynamics of composition resulting from the clashes - the arrangement of angles - of the weave of the fabric on its individual elements. Works created in this way, in their simplest form - devoid, for example, of additional knots, or constructed on the basis of a single-colour material - also standing on the formal border of painting and approaching craft, remind one of the basic element, which is nature, of the cycles and processes that take place in it. PROVENANCE: - private collection - Auction of Works of Art, Polswiss Art (29.05.2018, lot 44)