Wladyslaw Hasior (1928-1999), ASAMBLAZ, 1971.

plywood/paper, metallized film, beads, 80 x 160 cm
signed and dated on the back: HASIOR.W.1971

From 1947 he studied at the State High School of Visual Arts in Zakopane under Antoni Kenar. From 1952 to 1958, he studied at the Department of Sculpture of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of Professor Marian Wnuk. Considered a forerunner of world artistic trends, but at the same time a separate artist, distinguished by a strongly individualized interpretation of those trends. His assemblages are full of contradictions - they are elegant compositions made of elements taken from the "garbage dump" of civilization. Hasior created pop-art in a catastrophic edition, was a singer of the beauty of ugliness, combined seriousness with humor. He created a recognizable style and only his own repertoire of motifs, from which he built metaphorical works. Maria Anna Potocka undertook the task of compiling "Hasior's Little Dictionary of Visual Symbols," in which we find, among other things, an entry referring to the presented composition: "Silver - sheet or staniol. The background or surroundings of an object. Symbolizes the land of spirituality, a place that is not necessarily beautiful or happy, but free from death" ([in:] Władysław Hasior. The European Rauschenberg?, ed. J. Chrobak, Krakow 2014).
The artist himself rebelliously declared that artistic activity is a "provocation: intellectual, creative". However, this confrontational attitude was no stranger to poetic confessions: "For a column of overexposed water, wind and voice, glass and hair, stone and time, smoke and electricity, and finally any matter that gives shade and fire can be the material of art, provided that a free and audacious imagination chooses them, combines or tears them apart or burns them. [...] For me, the basic and most vivid forces that give birth to art are intuition, imagination and fantasy" ([in:]: Władysław Hasior. European..., op. cit. pp. 72-73).