Tomasz Ciecierski

Painter and the creator of drawings, photographs, collages, photomontages and relief paintings, hailed as one of the most outstanding contemporary Polish artists. He graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1971, and worked at his alma mater from 1972 to 1985 – from 1979 as a professor of drawing. Recipient of fellowships from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1981, 1983) and the Musée d’art contemporain in Nîmes (1990–1991). Winner of the 1991 Jan Cybis Prize for lifetime achievement. He lives and works in Warsaw.

Ciecierski’s work has been described as a ‘treatise on painting’, where he reflects profoundly on the discipline – analysing, verifying and updating the painterly medium. Originally a continuator of painting traditions, he conceptualised his visual language in the 1970s, breaking away from its modernist roots. He usually works in cycles, executing series of paintings and drawings. In the early 1970s, in a series of paintings about painting, he inventoried the tools and means available to the painter. In the mid-1970s he produced a series of Alogical Paintings, consisting of compositionally unconnected painterly elements, drawings, photographs and notes. Since the late-1970s he has been making expressive paintings with figurative elements, peopled by crowds of simplified, sketchy figures. In the 1980s he made large-format, dynamic compositions alluding to battle scenes. In the 1990s he disrupted the painting’s homogeneous, singular structure with multi-part relief compositions consisting of dozens of overlapping frames showing landscape motifs. At the beginning of the 21st century, Ciecierski returned to commenting on the art of painting in a series of monumental compositions comprised of hundreds of photographs on which he methodically recorded painterly accessories, products, and leftovers from painting procedures. Often montaging photographs into his paintings, the artist has in recent years produced several collage series.  At the same time he has continued painting series in which he combines paintings with photographs and objects, as well as combining different painting styles.