Dimensions: 81 x 100 cm
Signed, dated, and inscribed on the stretcher: 'A. MIERZEJEWSKI 1960 28'
Provenance
gift from the artist
private collection, Warsaw
Biography
Andrzej Mierzejewski (1915–1982) was a painter who worked outside of artistic groups and movements, consistently following his own artistic path. Born in Zakopane, the son of Formist Jacek Mierzejewski and the older brother of Jerzy Mierzejewski, he studied from 1935 to 1939 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw under Mieczysław Kotarbiński; he received his diploma after the war in 1947. He exhibited rarely, and his most significant solo exhibition took place at the Zachęta Gallery in 1980. His work was posthumously commemorated in an exhibition featuring three generations of the Mierzejewski family at the National Museum in Warsaw (2004).
Mierzejewski’s painting, grounded in a solid foundation in drawing, focuses on existential themes stemming from his personal wartime experiences and life traumas. The artist drew inspiration from Expressionism, Picasso’s Cubism, Existentialism, and the raw aesthetics of art brut, yet he always subordinated these influences to his own individual metaphors and reflections on the human condition. He created mainly figurative paintings, often untitled, in which the deformation of form served to intensify the emotional message.
Self-portraits were a significant motif in his work, varying stylistically from realistic to deeply distorted, existential images. Contradictory tensions coexist in his paintings: an obsession with death and an affirmation of life, fear and eroticism, alienation and the need for closeness, darkness and dreams. This internal ambivalence ensures that Andrzej Mierzejewski’s art retains a timeless power of impact and continues to resonate anew with the sensibilities of the contemporary viewer.
