132.00 x 132.00 cm - oil, film stretched on canvas
, signed p.g. vertically along the edge of the composition: WARSAW. E. MARKOWSKI
The painting was inspired by the concert of the king of pop music Michael Jackson, which took place on September 20, 1996 at the Bemowo airport in Warsaw. It was one of the first such large-scale concerts in Poland.
Typical of his composition, the artist accompanied it with a quote from Mark Twain and an image of Michael Jackson. This artistic commentary was placed by the artist on foil, which in those years (along with canvases and papers) he used as a substrate for his paintings. Mariusz Rosiak wrote about these compositions: [...] the reduction of artistic means, not for the first time in the history of art, resulted in an effect astonishing in the expression achieved. These drawings on foil and paper, painted actually with broad brushstrokes - as a rule, they are large in format, sometimes even exceeding the canvas formats characteristic of Markowski - are striking not only for the apparent modesty of the means used, not only for their concise and eccentric form, in which a note of gloomy grotesque resounds, but above all for their total commitment to the creation of this vision of the world, to which Markowski has been faithful from the beginning. The temperature of work on a painting or on a drawing reaches its climax. The vision becomes the summation. (Eugeniusz Markowski. Painting, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sandomierz, 1996)
Eugeniusz Markowski (Warsaw, November 8, 1912 - Warsaw, February 24, 2007) studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, receiving his diploma from Prof. Tadeusz Pruszkowski in 1939. He took part in the September campaign and the defense of Warsaw. From 1940 to 1950 he was in Italy, where he was associated with the Libera Associazione Arti Figurative group and the Art Club in Rome. He was also involved in designing sets for Rome's Teatro delle Arti. He was a dean and diplomat in Italy and Canada (1945-1955). After returning to Poland, he was director of the Office of Cultural Cooperation with Foreign Countries at the Ministry of Culture and Art (1960-1969), then lecturer and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1969-1984). He co-worked as a stage designer with the Gdansk Opera and Warsaw theaters. In 1963 he represented Poland at the Bieale in Sao Paulo and had several solo exhibitions. His expressive style of painting, directness and a certain rubbishiness of his figurative representations of fights and struggles caused him to be considered a forerunner of the "novae" in the 1980s.
