Alfred Lenica (1899-1977), Untitled, circa 1960.

Provenance
Warsaw, private collection. Nice, Galerie Ferrero

Alfred Lenica is one of the most important artists of the Polish avant-garde of the 20th century, a professional violinist by training, who, like many outstanding contemporary artists, studied painting outside the academic canon. He wrote: "music made it easier for me to learn about color and sound" (Gawrońska-Oramus B., Alfred Lenica, published by BOSZ, Olszanica 2016, p. 4). In the pre-war years, his painting technique focused on the themes of landscape, portrait and still life. In the postwar period, he began the process of searching for and shaping his individual style as an artist.

A decisive influence on the shape of this search was Lenica's displacement with his family from Poznan to Krakow, where the artist entered the circle of young artists associated with Tadeusz Kantor. Meeting them proved to be very inspiring - Lenica then undertook a number of experiments within the realm of abstract painting. These explorations were disrupted by the brief Socialist Realist period. However, as early as the second half of the 1950s, Lenica returned to his precursor activities within informel art. As he recalled: "I eliminated the traditional working tools I had used up to then, I simply poured paint directly onto the plane of the canvas, instead of brushes I used paper, rags, razor blades and fingers. I counted on chance" (Makowiecki W., Alfred Lenica 1899-1977, Arsenal City Gallery , Poznan 2002, p. 13). He used the dripping technique more and more often. This, combined with a feeling for surrealist art, allowed him to develop a distinctive style around 1958, based on swirling, colorful spots, sometimes bordered by an outline, which dynamically fill the fields of paintings. Painted mostly in oil paint, the freely spaced colorful forms were covered with a network of thin lines made with flowing varnish. Often one feels in them a reference to natural forms through which Lenica's painting was often called biological painting. He executed them in a manner similar to the creation of surrealist decalcomania, and in time turned it into his own technique, which became the artist's trademark. The earliest works from this trend, presented at the painter's first solo exhibition at Warsaw's Zachęta Gallery in 1958, made Lenica an icon of Polish Tascist painting.