Tomasz Ciecierski 1945-2024

Tomasz Ciecierski liked to work in cycles, working through a certain thread in a series of paintings and drawings. The last two paintings he painted would probably also have continuations and developments in subsequent works. In two-part canvases, he combined seemingly incompatible visualities: radically simplified geometry and the unbridled ebullience with which he painted expressive paintings from the 1980s. Earlier, he "combined something incombinable" in two-part canvases from ten years ago, looking for the only relationship between them in their extreme differentiation. He developed this hybrid way of combining very different compositional elements already in the 1970s in alogical paintings, in which he destroyed the traditional logic of the pictorial field.

He also mixed different techniques and media, crossed the boundaries of the painting, constantly deliberating in his painting on the subject of painting. When looking at his creative work, it is impossible to follow a linear narrative; rather, to get be drawn into the circles of swirling leads. Moreover, even as a collector, he placed more confidence in chaos than in chronology. His painting is situated in the field of tension between continuity and rupture, perpetuation and renewal, in the field of relations between the current and historic. He often returned to his favorite motifs, abandoned topics, or previously signaled threads. In his latest paintings, he once again reached for simplified silhouettes. The rhythmic repetition of their rows creates a score of movement and dynamics being played in between thick black and juicy red, between rigorous geometry and the sweeping freedom of the painterly gesture.

These two negativ-like juxtaposed paintings are the last ones he left behind. In the exhibition dedicated to his memory, we show alongside them a little-known series of surprising painted self-portraits, presented publicly only once.

The series of twelve canvases from 1982 represents a unique position in creativity of the artist, who usually resisted from showing himself, as he himself said, "marking his presence in a less obvious way: with photos in which only his legs are visible, and often only his feet photographed from above". It was only in the collages from the last two years that he included his image of the author looking through the window at fragments of his early paintings. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, several drawn self-portraits were created, each time treating the painter depicting himself in a humorous way: in the self-portrait with a brush, a fish or a still life. The painting series entitled Megalomania was undoubtedly an ironic riposte to the aestethic myths and megalomaniacal rhetoric gaining momentum in the 1980s. But this disenchanting the artist's myth in the self-portrait divided into twelve versions also had a self-ironic dimension, convincing the credibility of the creator, who with a humorous distance has been portraying himself as a painter.