Opis wystawy
Alfred Lenica – a painter, experimenter and musician by education – treated painting as a recording of sound and the painterly gesture as improvisation. His compositions pulsate with rhythm, colour and movement, creating visual scores of emotions. The Gallery invites you to Alfred Lenica’s exhibition Partytura ruchu (Movement Score) – a presentation of the paintings of one of the most outstanding Polish avant-garde artists of the 20th century, whose work remains one of the most interesting examples of the synthesis of music and image in post-war art. Alfred Lenica’s work returns today as a reminder of the inseparability of the senses – of hearing colours, feeling colours, and the haptic charm of painting materials. As the artist wrote: “My transition from music filling time to painting silence in space was not sudden. Music made it easier for me to learn about colour and sound.” For Lenica, a painting was a score of movement, a record of vibration, rhythm and tension that resulted from his musical sensitivity to harmony and dissonance. His compositions – both those from the 1940s and later – pulsate with energy, as if they were meant not only to be seen but also heard. Lenica – a violinist by training, a graduate of the Music Conservatory in Poznań – was an artist who ‘heard colours’ and ‘saw sounds’. In his paintings, the vibration of lines, the rhythm of spots and the pulsation of colours form almost musical sequences. Works such as Smugi i plamy (Streaks and Spots, 1954), Złudzenie rzeczywistości (The Illusion of Reality, 1957) and W zieleni (In Green, 1958) can be read as records of vibrations – a kind of painterly score in which sound takes the form of colour. The exhibition Partytura ruchu (Movement Score) places Lenica’s work in the broader context of 20th-century artistic explorations – from the avant-garde Krakow Group, through the experiments of Bogusław Schaeffer and Tadeusz Kantor, to contemporary attempts to combine image and sound in multimedia art. It is an invitation to see and hear at the same time, to immerse oneself in a world where painting sounds and silence has colour.