Roman Modzelewski, Armchair "RM58," 1950s.

State of preservation
slight surface scratches

Biography
Studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in the studios of Felicjan Kowarski and Leonard Pękalski. He received his diploma in painting in 1946. In 1937 he took part in the exhibition of Polish painting at the World Exhibition in Paris. After the war, he co-organized and founded an art college in Lodz - the current Academy of Fine Arts. He was associated with the Lodz university for 37 years. He was a professor there and the first rector by choice. In 1956, in Lodz, he took part in the exhibition of the Group of Lodz Artists alongside Stanisław Fijałkowski, Lech Kunka, Antoni Starczewski, Teresa Tyszkiewicz and Stefan Wegner. At first, he painted under the influence of Impressionism. His experiments with form and color initiated a direction described by Strzeminski as solarism. During this period he painted abstractions with allusions to reality contained in them. In the 1940s and 1950s, he began a series of works interpreting the themes of late Cubism. These were colorful and textural compositions. Explorations remaining in the circle of abstraction, geometry, related to the texture in the image, accompanied the entire, later work of the artist. Equally important in his artistic achievements were design works. He was one of the first artists in Poland to experiment with plastics in the mid-1950s. In 1957 he presented a prototype of two armchairs made with plastics. In 1961, he patented a model of an armchair made entirely of this material. This model won recognition from Le Corbusier, however, proposals to implement mass production in the West had no chance of success in Poland at the time. In 1966 he undertook the development of a yacht made of plastic. In the second half of the 1970s he designed and made the yacht "Amulet", in the 1980s he created its marine version - the yacht "Talisman". The artist's paintings are in museum collections at home and abroad, including: Museum of Art in Lodz, National Museum in Warsaw, Museum in Vienna, as well as in private collections and collections.