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Lot description
(Krakow, Poland 1923–2011) Women with the mirror, 1980, signed and dated on the reverse, oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm, framed We are grateful to Andrzej Szczepaniak, curator, art historian, researcher and expert of the artist, for the information he kindly provided on this work. Provenance: Private Collection since the 1990s “I don’t know why it happens like this, but certain spiritual matters that need to be renamed laboriously are best done in black. I don’t know why, I really don’t know everything. This is where darkness, night lies. These are matters of night consciousness” The consciousness of the icon, Jerzy Nowosielski interviewed by Paweł Kwiatkowski (1983), in: Jerzy Nowosielski, Art after the end of the world. Conversations, Znak, Kraków 2011, p. 225. It all started in 1971, when Jerzy Nowosielski designed the set and costumes for Antigone directed by Helmut Kajzar for the Polish Theater in Wroclaw. He chose the ubiquitous and dominant black. Everything in this performance – an adaptation of Sophocles’ text – took place in black: walls, curtains and the characteristic long tunnel. These experiences while working on Antigone bring about a new series of paintings in Nowosielski’s work – the so-called black paintings, or Nudes in the Darkroom, which he would create until the early 1980s. In this very darker tone, he paints ethereal nudes, half-nudes, portraits and scenes with double nudes, in which female figures resembling apparitions emerge from the pitch-black background like glowing coals. They shimmer in an extraordinary way with shades of orange and red, as if they were burning with fire. Only halftones of blue, gray and concentrated reflections of light in the form of white appear suddenly. Jerzy Nowosielski’s new series of paintings was another stage of the sublimation of the female body, taking it further and further into infinite areas of spirituality. Andrzej Szczepaniak