CDLV | Collection Co–selection

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Stefan Gierowski

CDLV

1980
painting; oil on canvas; 200x138 cm

The evolution of Gierowskis work moved him towards strengthening its intellectual aspect. In the mid-1960s, the artist moved closer towards exploration characteristic of op-art painting, although it was a purely formal, superficial similarity. In the 1970s, he focused on the interactions between colour fields, both contrasted and broken down into spots of pure pigment. In the paintings from the 1980s, the emotional impact of colour was most important, and Gierowski began to express himself in a more subjective way. In his latest work, he uses basic geometric shapes and intense colours. Some paintings are almost monochromatic, constructed only by the intensity of colour.

In CDLV we see alternately painted horizontal zones of cold and warm colours. The artist explores the ways in which individual colours interact. The horizontal arrangements are paired with vertical divisions, obtained thanks to the illusion of concavity and convexity of the texture. Light is very important to Gierowski with it, he builds the depth of the composition. Frequent motifs on his canvases are bright paths emanating with energy against a dark background, resembling crevices through which the light can emanate. By means of radically reduced elements of the painterly language, the artist explores the mutual relations between line and colour. The line is both calm and emotional; it can add dynamics to the plane, but also restrain it. It can be an element that closes the composition or opens it to another space. During the 1980s, the line was Gierowskis main tool for building a painting; it has become a carrier of energy a light that moves the space.

Stefan Gierowski (19252022) a representative of contemporary painting avant-garde, a classic of Polish modernity. From 19451948, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, in the studios of prof. Zbigniew Pronaszko and prof. Karol Frycz. From 1962 to 1996, he conducted teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, also serving as the dean of the Faculty of Painting. Gierowski was an outstanding educator among others, Marek Sobczyk and Jarosław Modzelewski, graduated from his studio.

His early figurative paintings betray the influence of post-Cubist aesthetics, but as early as 1957, Gierowski developed his own abstract style, based on exploration of colour. From then on, his paintings play primarily with the plane, light, and colour; sometimes they are almost monochrome disturbed by the dominant of a single, intense colour. The emphasis placed on the very phenomenon of painting shows that Gierowski began searching for a new formula of painting devoid of any content apart from the effects of colour. Simultaneously, he stopped giving his paintings titles and since then he began marking them with Roman numerals (not always in the right order).