Jacek Sempoliński, Skull, 1986

80 x 68.5 cm - oil, canvas

signed on the reverse on canvas g.: sempoliński | '86 | skull
sign. on the loom g. strip in marker: 80 | 68


♣ Droit de suite: ♣ An additional fee will be added to the Purchase Price based on the right of the artist and his heirs to receive remuneration in accordance with the Law of February 4, 1994 - on Copyright and Related Rights (droit de suite).

Jacek Sempoliński (Warsaw 27 March 1927 - Warsaw 30 August 2012) - painter, draughtsman, educator, critic and essayist. In 1943-1944 he studied painting at the Konrad Krzyzanowski underground school in Warsaw. After the war, he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw under, among others, Eugeniusz Eibisch (1946-1951, diploma 1956). Since 1956 he has worked as a teacher at his alma mater. Initially, in addition to easel painting, he practiced scenography and fresco painting. In 1953-1957 he made polychromes of the rebuilt townhouses of the New and Old Towns in Warsaw.
Sempoliński's painting work should be seen in the context of two phenomena of Polish postwar art: the tradition of Polish colorism and the ethos of the ARSENAL 55 generation. While the Kapist school imbued his painting with what we call "image culture," the Arsenal experience added drama and caused moral and ethical values to take an equal position with formal values.
In his cycles from the second half of the 1950s ("Organ," "Viola da Gamba," "Composition with Trumpet"), the artist referred to music, drawing from it iconographic themes and at the same time treating it as a symbolic area. Since the 1960s, he combined motifs taken from the study of landscape and architecture with color and texture solutions close to allusive abstraction (the cycles "Łysica", "Vines in Mąchocice"). In the 1970s, he focused his attention on abstracted problems of color, light, painterly space and texture (cycles "Light and darkness", Meadow - sunset, Study of space).
Since the late 1970s, dramatic existential themes become apparent in Sempolinsky's paintings, expressed by changing the color scheme (dark blues, purples, cold grays) and carrying out physical destruction of canvases. The new series "Face" (from 1971), "Crucifixion" (from 1975), "The Power of Verdi's Destiny" (1977) and "Skull" (from the 1980s) touch on problems of religion, culture, philosophy of existence. These works, which are traces of profound experiences and reflections, were part of the period of revaluation of the 1980s. The attitude presented by Jacek Sempoliński during this period gained him the position of both artistic and - thanks to numerous statements, essays, etc. - intellectual authority. - intellectual. From the years of martial law dates his association with the movement of independent culture, finding support in the Church. He participated in many exhibitions of this trend, including memorable arrangements by Janusz Bogucki and Nina Smolarz ("Sign of the Cross," Parish on Zytnia Street, Warsaw 1983, "Labyrinth - Underground Space," Church of the Ascension, Warsaw 1989), Marek Rostworowski ("Niebo nowe i ziemia nowa?", Parish on Zytnia Street, Warsaw 1985) and others.
Selected exhibitions and awards: 1955 - National Exhibition of Young Visual Arts, Arsenal, Warsaw (equal prize) 1976 - Jan Cybis Award, Warsaw 1986 - Brother Albert Award, Warsaw.