Henryk Stażewski was born in Warsaw in 1894. He studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1913-1919) under Professor Stanisław Lentz. During this period, he grew familiar with various forms of avant-garde practices, although his attraction to geometric abstraction places his work more firmly in the wake of constructivism. Generally speaking, it is the forward-thinking experimental spirit of the avant-garde, rather than a single style, that Stażewski embodies more than anything else.
In this connection, the artist founded and was affiliated with a plethora of groups and collectives, all focused on pushing artistic boundaries. He joined the first Polish avant-garde group founded in 1917, the Polish Expressionists, renamed the Formists in 1919. He was a founding member of the Blok cubist, constructivist and supremacist group (1924-1926), and of the groups that took up the baton: Praesens (1926-1929) and a.r. (1929-1936). He also edited the periodicals Blok and Praesens, which maintained numerous international contacts with other avant-garde groups, including the Dutch De Stijl. Indeed, during various stays in Paris starting in 1924, he developed ties with Piet Mondrian and Michel Seuphor, and belonged to Paris-based international groupings Cercle et Carre (from 1929) and Abstraction-Création (from 1931). After the war, the artist joined the Young Artists and Scientists Club and the avant-garde Krzywe Koło Gallery in Warsaw. In 1965, together with Wiesław Borowski, Anka Ptaszkowska and Mariusz Tchorek, he initiated the creation of the Foksal Gallery.
Artistically speaking, Stażewski built on his constructivist geometry, while diversifying his formal approach. The artist structured the space of his compositions using squares of different colours with rounded corners. In the early 1930s, this figurative current crystallised in the artist’s work and continued to develop until the 1950s; it abounded in his landscapes, portraits and still lives. In the second half of the 1950s, the artist introduced a new element into his visual language: the medium of relief. Relief was then superseded by painting, on which the artist focused exclusively for almost twenty years. In the 1960s, Stażewski developed a fascination with white, which was a manifestation of his reflections on the neutrality of form ‘in itself’ and its dependence on compositional context. Parallel to his ‘white period’, Stażewski made attempts to penetrate space in a series of copper reliefs from 1964-1967. He delineated grids of squares, distorting the regularity of their arrangement or attacking them with an aggressive ‘ray’. In the 1980s, Stażewski harnessed the interplay of colour and geometric form to dynamic effect.
Stażewski made his debut in 1920, showing his works together with the Formists at the Warsaw Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. In 1921, he presented his paintings at the avant-garde Polish Artistic Club alongside Mieczysław Szczuka. In 1922, he took part in the F9 Formist exhibition at the Czesław Garliński Salon in Warsaw. Then, in 1923, he participated in the New Art Exhibition in Vilnius and the International New Art Exhibition in Łódź, both of which launched the constructivist movement in Poland. Futher exhibitions saw him travel to Paris (Musée d’Art Moderne, 1977, 1982; the Centre Pompidou, 1983), Stockholm, Amsterdam, Brussels and Geneva (1959), Venice (1959, 1966, 1986), New York (Museum of Modern Art, 1976), Oslo (1961), Essen (1962, 1973), Stuttgart (1962), Chicago (1964, 1966, 1967, 1972), Bochum (1964), Tel Aviv (1965), Tokyo (1966), London (Royal Academy, 1970, 1984), Strasbourg (1970), Düsseldorf (1974, 1981, 1982), Milan (1974, 1986), Zurich (1974, 1975), Hamburg (1975), Madrid, Berlin and Cologne (1977), Rome (1979) and Los Angeles (1981). A retrospective exhibition of Stażewski’s art was organised in 1994 at the Art Museum in Łódź. At the XXXIII Biennale held in Venice in 1966, the artist received an honorary mention, and in 1972 he won the Herder Prize, awarded by the University of Vienna.
Stażewski passed away in 1988.
