Ciecierski, Tomasz: Untitled (1995)

Polish painter Tomasz Ciecierski (1945, Krakow) is most interested in the nature of painting and representation, the process of creating a picture; the subject of his art is his own craft. In the series he made in the middle of the seventies, he surrounded the photorealistic landscapes with “anti-logical” details, abstract elements; in the eighties and nineties he combined graphics with shapes of concrete painting, and often employed the “picture-in-the-picture” technique. Ludwig Museum purchased this work at his 2001 exhibition in Platán Gallery, Painting. The work is constructed from a multitude of smaller pictures: this is a favoured method with Ciecierski, which enables him to render the fragmented quality of perception, as well as to create a larger composition from smaller, sketchy works. Each of the small canvases can be considered a landscape, in which the lower of the two bands of the picture surface stands for the ground, the upper for the sky. Ciecierski can be regarded a late successor of analytical painting, the practice of decomposing reality into its elements.