Zdzislaw Beksinski

(1929-)

He was born on 24th February 1929 in Sanok, Poland. Beksinski enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture of the Cracow University of Technology. After graduation in 1952, he lived first in Cracow and later in Rzeszów, and finally, in 1955, returned with his wife to Sanok.

Beksinski's numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad, and also the substantial number of publications by him, including catalogues and albums, and the innumerable interviews with him and films about him have put him into the narrow group of the most talked about and best known Polish artists.

His early pictures were Expressionist in character: 'Figures crying out in the wilderness,' he recalls, 'people with heads of stone, women in childbirth, people in the act of copulation, defecation, dying, people being executed by firing squad or by hanging, prisons, windowless cities. Beksinski opened up to the sub-conscious, not afraid of what he would encounter in it, and it was from these experiences of drawing that the paintings of his 'fantasy period' developed. That was when a technique to which the artist has remained loyal to the present day was confirmed and stabilized: his painting in oils. The picture was to be a mirror image of an inner vision. Beksinski’s most spectacular of group of pictures from the 1967-1983 'fantasy period' is extraordinary witness to a vision full of drama, anxiety, and destruction not so much of the outside world but rather of a spiritual or psychological world.

Beksinski’s famous paintings include:
Piper
Cross
Cathedral
Stone Man
Bones
Embrace
Glacier
Motorbike Rider
Helmet