Post by Bonobo on Jun 19, 2011 20:35:43 GMT 1
Jan Lebenstein
Polish painter, draughtsman, printmaker and illustrator, active in France. From 1949 to 1954 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. After winning the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris at the Biennale des Jeunes in 1959 he settled permanently in Paris. His early works (1954–6) are a direct response to the Socialist Realist devaluation of iconography and the studio. His masterly, picturesque Landscapes from Rembertów depict a world of mean suburbs banished to the periphery of official mythology through the image of an industrialized town and industrious countryside. People vanishing from run-down outlying districts appear elsewhere as Figures in Interiors —dumb, hieratic beings imprisoned in cramped, anonymous spaces. In the extensive series Axial Figures (1956–60) the shapes change into semi-insects bordering on abstraction; reduced to an impastoed skeleton by thick layers of paint with a texture resembling sand and stone, they are transformed into creatures of inanimate matter. The Abominable Creatures (a series of 1960–65) are half-human, half-bestial monsters; represented in dark colours, the figures come to life, quietly threaten each other and perform gloomy and secret rituals.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/JanLebenstein-vitrail3.JPG
More:
polscy-malarze.pl/lebenstein_en.html
Polish painter, draughtsman, printmaker and illustrator, active in France. From 1949 to 1954 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. After winning the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris at the Biennale des Jeunes in 1959 he settled permanently in Paris. His early works (1954–6) are a direct response to the Socialist Realist devaluation of iconography and the studio. His masterly, picturesque Landscapes from Rembertów depict a world of mean suburbs banished to the periphery of official mythology through the image of an industrialized town and industrious countryside. People vanishing from run-down outlying districts appear elsewhere as Figures in Interiors —dumb, hieratic beings imprisoned in cramped, anonymous spaces. In the extensive series Axial Figures (1956–60) the shapes change into semi-insects bordering on abstraction; reduced to an impastoed skeleton by thick layers of paint with a texture resembling sand and stone, they are transformed into creatures of inanimate matter. The Abominable Creatures (a series of 1960–65) are half-human, half-bestial monsters; represented in dark colours, the figures come to life, quietly threaten each other and perform gloomy and secret rituals.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/JanLebenstein-vitrail3.JPG
More:
polscy-malarze.pl/lebenstein_en.html
