Jerzy Kujawski (1921-1998) - Composition

Very beautiful and rare work (on paper) by the artist Kujawski, circa 1960
Private collection, Paris , unframed .

From postwar surrealism to erotic surrealism

Jerzy Kujawski worked with a large number of artists linked to the postwar surrealist movement. In the second half of the 1940s, Kujawski's art was characterized by surrealist painting, graphic works and drawings that straddled the boundary between dream and reality. Later, he became one of the first lyrical abstract painters devoted to informal abstract painting. In the 1960s, he experimented with different techniques and above all with decalcomanie. Then a great transformation occurred in his art. He abandoned abstract art and returned to figurative painting. He then explored the techniques of monotype, transfer (calque) and silkscreen - techniques used by pop culture artists. Finally, the surrealist technique of body calques and his erotic obsessions mark his works.

A Polish artist in Paris:

Jerzy Kujawski was born in Ostrow in 1921. Initially deported with his family to the Wielkopolska region, he would later live through the war period between Krakow and Warsaw where he would respectively associate with Marian Bogusz and the circle of young artists. It is thus that Jerzy Kujawski counted among his friends Tadeusz Kantor, Tadeusz Brzozowski and Jerzy Nowosielski, better known as Kantor.
In 1945 he settled in Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and entered the intimate circle of André Breton's friends. Kujawski always maintained contacts with Polish artists such as Bogusz, Alfred Lenica and Jerzy Skarżyński, and had the opportunity to meet Topor, Alina Szapocznikow and Roman Cieślewicz. In international exhibitions he presented himself as a Polish painter living in Paris.
Kujawski died in 1998 in Paris, in a certain artistic solitude that he had maintained since the 1970s.

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