Franciszek Starowieyski (1930 Bratkówka near Krosno - 2009 Warsaw), "Die Zofen / The Maids," 1987

Biography
He came from a noble family, sealing with the Biberstein coat of arms. He completed his artistic studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow and Warsaw. He gained popularity in the 1960s with a series of theater and film posters. He was involved in painting, posters, graphic design, theater and television set design. His paintings are characterized by a fascination with the female body with "Rubensian" shapes, sensuality and reflection on transience and death. In his "theaters of drawing," he combined the two arts into a single "spectacle of all sorts of arts," a media phenomenon in which the very act of creation, its spectacular and - thanks to the author's erudition - literary elements, as well as the work itself in the traditional sense are of equal artistic value. In Starowieyski's paintings, the real world merges with the creations of "unrestrained" imagination, and his work, ostentatiously referring to the old 17th-century masters, is saturated with grotesque and humor.