Tomasz Ciecierski was born in Krakow in 1945. His academic life as an artist revolves around the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. A student at the Academy until 1971, he subsequently taught there between 1972 and 1985. Scholarships led him to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1981), and later to the Musée dʻArt Contemporain in Nîmes (1990-1991). A pupil of the European masters, Ciecierski’s early work invokes the developments from the Renaissance era to the 20th century.
A technical draughtsperson, the painter dedicated his early years to seemingly hasty sketches, both gestural and semiotic. The physicality of these sketches speaks to Ciecierski’s meta-technical approach to the medium of painting: he seeks its essence, constantly adapting and evolving his understanding.
The 1980s marked a shift in his work prompted by a rejection of traditional image composition. Ciecierski began creating relief arrangements while embracing abstraction. These structures began to progressively challenge the flatness of painting, with their superimposed canvases and layered planes. The result is reminiscent of the structure of Japanese prints in which artists superimpose planes to overcome the absence of perspective.
The 1990s saw ‘landscape’, as a genre and motif, gain in importance. Initially an accessory to composition, a genre among so many others, landscape took centre stage in Ciecierski’s increasingly picturesque patchwork structures. Despite turning to nature, Ciecierski does not paint in outdoors. Rather, he reaches down into his memory in a bid to recreate scenes in the studio, but does not capture scenes in the wild.
Ciecierski’s meta-critical approach led him to self-commentary of his own work around the year 2000, painting over previous pieces as a means of assessment. By treating his own work as pre-existing media or found objects, he was free to associate them with other objects and images at will. The patchwork process reached its peak in 2004 with an untitled composition made up of 480 small photographs mounted on a 120 x 603 cm board. The project emulated the artist’s own documentation process (postcards, newspaper clippings, Polaroid photos, amateur photographs), which can be seen in his studio.
The mid-2000s onwards saw more derivation in Ciecierksi’s work, with the solo exhibition Pact with painting (2003) at Bunkier Sztuki in Krakow appearing as a personal retrospective, the series Happy 50s (2006) functioning as a reflection on 20th-century art, and the Złoty Środek exhibition (2013) allowing Ciecierski to revisit and stylistically ‘refresh’ his own corpus.
Stimulated by discussion and collaboration, Ciecierski, alongside Ryszard Grzyb, Robert Maciejuk, Paweł Susid, Włodzimierz Zakrzewski and Tomasz Tatarczyk, founded the Pendzle artistic group, which has several interesting initiatives under its belt, including DESA NT (2014) and 454 years of Polish art. The Pendzle Group Exhibition (2018).
