‘In the medieval tradition, Beksiński seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh––whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish––thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust.’
Zdzisław Beksiński was a Polish painter, photographer, and sculptor, who became known for the dystopian surrealism of his art. Born in Sanok, Poland in 1929, he grew up in a war-torn nation occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. At the beginning of World War II, Sanok’s population was about 30% Jewish. By the end of the war the vast majority of jewish inhabitants had been deported, murdered or fled. Even non-Jewish Poles were persecuted by the Nazis. Approximately 5.6 million Poles died as a result of the German occupation, with a further 150,000 more deaths under the subsequent Soviet occupation. While little is known about the specifics of Beksiński’s childhood, it is likely that growing up in Poland at such a time was a brutal, traumatising experience, especially for a child, and that war time images would have had a lasting influence on him.
As an artist, Beksiński was fascinated with death, decay and darkness, and detailed scenes of death and decay became his hallmark, along with landscapes filled with skeletons, skulls and graveyards. These paintings were painted with grim precision, creating oneiric and hellish, disturbing landscapes and figures within a nightmarish ambient.
Despite the grim overtones, Beksiński claimed some of his works were misunderstood; in his opinion, they were rather optimistic or even humorous. For the most part, Beksiński was adamant that even he did not know the meaning of his artworks and that he was uninterested in possible interpretations; in keeping with this notion, he refused to provide titles for any of his drawings or paintings. At the time, Beksiński claimed,
‘I don't want to say or convey anything. I just paint what comes to my mind… I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams.’
While all of his work was rather dark, capturing the unsettling underside of human consciousness, his initial work focused on dystopian apocalyptic landscapes and utilized expressionistic colour (see also lot 17) while his later work was more abstract, formalistic, and used a muted colour palette.
The present work was painted in 1984. The 1980s were a transitory period for Beksiński. Having found fame in Poland in the 1960s, it was during this time that his works became more popular in France due to the endeavors of Piotr Dmochowski, and also achieved significant popularity in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan.
Beksiński’s paintings inspired many artists. The Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro credits him for inspiring his movie Pan’s Labyrinth, for which he won an Oscar in 2006. In Poland, Beksiński’s works influenced many rock musicians, and lately the creators of the video game Tormentum. After his death, Burning Man in the USA erected a cross in his memory, as an ode to the artist.