Jerzy Kujawski (1921-1998) - Composition

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

From post-war surrealism to erotic surrealism

Jerzy Kujawski worked with a large number of artists tied to the post-war surrealist movement. In the second half of the 1940s, Kujawski's art is characterized by surrealist painting, graphic works, and drawings that play at the boundaries 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 various techniques and above all decoupage (transfer printing). Then a major transformation occurred in his art. He abandoned abstract art and returned to figurative painting. He then explored techniques of monotype, tracing paper, and silkscreen – techniques used by pop culture artists. Finally, the surrealist technique of layering bodies 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 spend the war period between Krakow and Warsaw, where he respectively frequented 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 attend the École des Beaux-Arts and entered the intimate circle of André Breton’s friends. Kujawski has 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 he had maintained since the 1970s.

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