Dimensions: 101 x 81 cm
signed and described on the reverse: 'ID. COLLECTIVE AND | LEWCZUK'
Exhibited
Slawomir Lewczuk. Painting, ZPAP Krakow, November 1978
Literature
Slawomir Lewczuk. Painting, exhibition catalog, ZPAP, Kraków 1978, p. nlb. (il.)
Biography
Lewczuk Slawomir (1938-2020). Artist, graphic artist, draughtsman, stage designer, was born in Cherkasy in Volhynia. He graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Cracow University of Technology and, in 1965, from painting at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, in the studio of Emil Krcha. He was associated with the Krakow art community, but functioned on its fringes. The protagonists of his works were invariably people captured in various constellations. Their silhouettes are stripped of color - mostly gray, always nameless, often faceless, mutilated or deformed. They often have accentuated ears, noses, mouths, tongues - organs through which contacts in the world take place. For what the artist had in mind first and foremost was the interpersonal space - the human in his paintings always appears in relation to another human/people/environment. In these relationships he loses his individuality - he becomes a "gray mass", "kneaded" in the fashion of others. His paintings are disciplined, orderly, governed by strict rigor; in many of them the content is enclosed in a simple, laconic sign. The surprising contexts in which the figures in Levchuk's paintings appear bring to mind associations with surrealism, but it is difficult to suspect him of succumbing to the mechanisms of automatic recording. Indeed, these contexts were deeply thought out, and the message of his works was very clear.
Slawomir Lewczuk received the 2019 Witold Wojtkiewicz Award organized by the Cracow District of the Association of Polish Artists and Designers, awarded for the best exhibition of painting, drawing or graphic art held in Cracow during its consecutive annual edition.