Every work of art, even one seemingly inconspicuous, is a result of highly complex processes. Each one is a separate world. So it is a good idea to have a precise look at them.

Precisely! is the title of a series of exhibitions during which we will focus our attention and that of our visitors’ on a single work of art. We will look at it, explain it, discuss it and place it in broader contexts.

Nude, Jerzy Nowosielski, 1978

Jerzy Nowosielski, one of the most outstanding Polish painters of the second half of the 20th century, gave a unique place to the nude in his work. With a centuries-old tradition, this genre gained a new, extremely original dimension in the artist’s approach. Nowosielski has been painting nudes for nearly seventy years, constantly searching for more and more perfect forms of expression.

In the late 1970s, his paintings featured visionary nudes against a dark, hard-to-identify background. It is from this period that the painting presented at our exhibition comes from, which came to the collection of the National Museum in Gdańsk in 1982, straight from the artist’s hands.

The background of the painting, suggesting the wall of some austere interior, is composed of several rectangles painted in different shades of blue. In the lower left-hand corner is a small but intense patch of red floor. Against this background, the painter placed a female nude, frozen in a mysterious sitting position.

The body and legs are divided by a network of expressive lines into planes of various shades of grey, which sometimes turn into pale pink tones. Individual body fragments painted this way look like monitors emitting mysterious light from inside the figure.

An oval head on a slender neck emerges from above the torso shown below, as if from behind a theatre costume. The mask-like face shows disturbing, cavernous openings for the eyes and mouth, surrounded by a sharp orange outline. Light streaks on the forehead, under the eyes, under the nose and on the chin give the face an animal, cat-like expression.

Below, on the chest divided by a sharp vertical line, you can see concentric circles creating the image of full female breasts. In place of the navel, there is a mysterious vertical scar. Its orange edge casts a colourful shadow on the bulge of the abdomen shown below.

The composition is dominated by horizontal and vertical lines, which create a separate abstract structure superimposed on the image of the human body in space. The painter does not tell us any story that develops over time but instead looks for a timeless approach. The forsaking of any narrative or psychologisation leads to the work being saturated with an intense spiritual aura, so characteristic of Nowosielski’s work.

Curators of the exhibition series: Agata Abramowicz, Jacek Friedrich
Curators: Emilia Kalinowska, Maria Szymańska-Korejwo,