ALEKSANDRE KOBZDEJ

Autor: Fatih Dulger (w ramach programu Erasmus +)

Pod kierunkiem Prof dr hab. Iwony Szmelter i mgr Anny Kowalik

Aleksander Kobzdej was born in 1920 in Olesko, Ukraine. He studied Architecture in the Technical University, where he took lessons in sculpture and received education in painting under the guidance of Wladyslaw Lam in Lwów between 1939-41. Graduated in 1946 in the same department of the University on Technology in Gdansk. He became a member of the Polish Association of Artists (ZPAP) and participated in his first exhibitions.

Kobzdej started as a post-Impressionist but his works eventually became more abstract.

His initial progress as a painter sprang from Colourism and a cult of tradition and competent workmanship. Towards the end of the 1940s both his paintings and drawings began to allude to the 19th century Realist tradition, also he exhibited bits of European Realism. This led him to Socialist Realism in the early later 1940s.

Beginning in 1950 he was an active participant in official arts reviews, including the annual Polish National Visual Arts Exhibitions organized in Warsaw by the Ministry of Culture and Art, he obtained the 3rd prize for his painting Podaj cegłę (Pass the brick, 1949) at the 1st National Art Exhibition at the National Museum in Warsaw. This work is considered a model realization of the principles set forth for art by Socialist Realist ideologues precisely for its optimistic and propagandistic tone and its formally schematic nature. In other compositions of this period, the painter ably depicted the tragic nature of superhuman effort (Ceglarki / Women Bricklayers, 1950).

He got his degree in painting in 1951 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, in the sudio of Eugeniusz Eibisch.

In 1951 he moved to Warsaw, took charge of a workshop at the Faculty of Interior Design and employed at the Academy of Fine Arts, first, as an assistant lecturer, then from 1954 professor, and after, repeatedly Dean of the Department of Painting. In the Department of Painting he also run a painting studio till the end of his life.

In the nineteen-fifties Kobdzej turned to abstract painting. Slowly though began to stray away from Socialist Realist iconography and he moved toward exotic depictions and more narrative pieces, mainly influenced by his travels to the Far East.

He travelled to China and Vietnam between 1953 and 1954, where he made the cycle of the reportage drawings, wherewith he took part in the 27th Biennale in Venice, in 1954. These works demonstrate his interest in means of expression that do not reflect reality, and transform it instead into art. The artist abandoned the narrative bareness of representation opting for more subtle means of expression in both his paintings and drawings.

“I believe that one of the fairly important facts is my journey to the Far East. It was not just because of my direct contact with a different culture and landscape. I have a feeling that the geographical distance made me see my own environment and myself more distinctly.”

In 1955 he created his first works from the cycle Thickets, with he started moveing away from his previous style toward informel and structural painting. In the series of paintings titled Gęstwiny (Arrays, 1955).

He designed the building of the Chinese Embassy in Warsaw, together with Romuald Gutt and Tadeusz Zieliński.

Towards the end of this same decade, the painter traveled around Western Europe. He wrote about these trips (to Italy, France, Britain, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the US) that it have expanded his “capacity for critical comparisons” by reason of the variety of attitudes. The voyage transformed his art fundamentally, to the extent that one might even say it revolutionized Kobzdej's work. He discarded representation and began to paint metaphorical compositions with a dramatic, even eschatological mood, which were impressive for their refined color schemes (see the series Idole / Idols, 1958-59; and the triptych Na śmierć człowieka / For the Death of a Man, 1964). This path led him directly to Informel art.

In 1959 he took part in the 5th Biennale in Sao Paulo, where he won the 2nd prize for the cycle Idols. Several months stay in Paris resulted in the exhibition at the Galerie de l’Ancienne Comedie. In the subsequent year he participated in the opening of the exhibition at French and Company Gallery in New York.

He gradually devoted more of his efforts to researching the structure of paintings. He came to underline the material status and rank of paint itself, differentiating textures and highlighting the nuances inherent in color. A masterly example of this approach, belonging firmly within the realm of "matter" painting, is the series Szczeliny (Crevices) dating from the 1960s. These works combine the properties of flat compositions with those of the technique of relief. Though they constitute integral wholes played out on a plane, they simultaneously seek to go beyond the limitations thereof. Kobzdej achieved the effect by layering paint thickly and by introducing non-painting materials, small elements of various derivation (particles of metal, wood, plastic) that seemed to emerge from between two bands of painted canvas. The next phase in Kobzdej's explorations took the form of spatial objects composed of rectangular platens that seemed to press an untamable, pulpy mass out of an invisible tube (Powierzchnia srebrna podparta reliefem / Silver Surface Supported by a Relief, 1967).

In 1965 he took part in Documenta III in Kassel, which resulted in a creative stay in Germany, as a guest of the Folkwang Museum in Essen.

During working in Warsaw in 1965 and 1966 he was head of the Painting Faculty at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunste in Hamburg.

In 1966 he received the Gottfried Herder Prize.

In 1968 he participated in the opening of the exhibition “Six Painters from Poland” at the Royal College of Art Galleries in London. In 1969 a monographic exhibition of this artist’s work took place at the National Museum in Poznań.

The artist resorted to yet other solutions during the last years of his life. In 1969 he started working on the cycle of Hors cadres (1969-1972) a series of several dozen highly original painterly and sculpted structures formed of a moldable mass "draped" on a metal mesh.

Kobzdej also created a series of paintings intended for specific interiors (Baby gołuchowskie / Gołuchów Babushkas - for Gołuchów Castle), and designed scenery, posters, and book illustrations.

He died on 25 September 1972.