Zdzisław Beksiński, WAITING, 1971

74 x 92 cm - oil on fiberboard

signed on the reverse on the board, left: BEKSIŃSKI 71
in the center of the board’s reinforcement, in white paint: 15; above it, a fragment of a sticker from the Galeria Współczesna in Warsaw with the exhibition date January 7, 1973

The painting by Zdzisław Beksiński featured in this auction was displayed at the artist’s highly acclaimed exhibition at Galeria Współczesna at the turn of 1972 and 1973. The exhibition, organized by Janusz Bogucki, brought Beksiński great success, which was sealed by the sale of all the paintings from that exhibition. When asked by Bogucki to title the paintings, the artist gave them all the same title—*Waiting*—explaining in a letter to an art critic that he had come up with each title separately, even though they were all identical. In a typescript printed on one of the two pages of the exhibition brochure, he stated: “This uniformity in no way diminishes my Sisyphean effort; after all, Sisyphus, too, was constantly pushing the same boulder up the same mountain, and he was no less exhausted by doing so than he would have been by pushing a different boulder up a different mountain each time.”
The exhibition received a number of reviews in which critics emphasized the uniqueness of Beksiński’s painting. Wojciech Skrodzki wrote: In Beksiński’s painting, dreams and dream visions play a very significant role, treated as the key to an intuitive understanding of the spiritual reality that eludes us, and at the same time as a direct expression of the imaginative richness of the human psyche. (...) Beksiński has an excellent sense of the evocative, magical qualities of the imagination as it takes shape in the process of giving visual form to a vision. Symbolic and sign-based forms are often simple and easily legible here; at times, however, they speak more through the mood they create or through the general suggestion of the context in which they appear. The authentic inventiveness and richness of these forms go hand in hand with their naturalness (Wojciech Skrodzki, “Poem of Waiting,” in *Literatura* no. 4, January 25, 1973, p. 13).
Teresa Sowińska stated: “The perfection of the craft ensures that the creatures and apparitions conjured from the imagination possess an almost tangible materiality of real existence.” (...) The literary vision is evocative thanks to the flawless use of expressive devices. The most important of these are grotesque deformation, caricature, and the use of the atmospheric and emotional qualities of color. (...) The color palette of the paintings, maintained within a narrow, often monochromatic range of cool blues, grays, and earthy browns, intensifies the spectral nature of the scenery. Occasionally, a strong flash of light pierces the darkness, illuminating snow-capped mountain peaks with a cold glow and bathing a patch of cloud in a golden radiance. But there is not enough of it to illuminate everything. One possible interpretation (Teresa Sowińska, Makowski, Beksiński, and Deskur: Spectres and Sphinxes, *Przegląd Artystyczny* No. 3, 1973, p. 14).


The painting has been exhibited, mentioned, and reproduced, among others, in: The painting has been exhibited:
– Zdzisław Beksiński. Paintings from 1971–1972, “Ruch” Contemporary Art Gallery, International Press and Book Club, Warsaw, December 7, 1972 – January 7, 1973.
Painting reproduced:
– Zdzisław Beksiński Art Promotion Archive, website (https://www.beksinskiarchiwum.net).
♣ Droit de suite: ♣ An additional fee will be added to the Purchase Price, arising from the right of the artist and his heirs to receive remuneration in accordance with the Act of February 4, 1994, on Copyright and Related Rights (droit de suite).

Zdzisław Beksiński (Sanok, February 24, 1929 – Warsaw, February 21, 2005) studied at the Faculty of Architecture of the Kraków University of Technology from 1947 to 1952. He was a self-taught artist who achieved an unquestioned status in Polish contemporary art, confirmed by the presence of his works in prestigious exhibitions and museum collections. Initially, he focused on photography, a field he had been interested in since his student years; after 1956, he gained recognition as a creator of photograms whose aesthetic was based on textural effects. From 1958 to 1962, he created abstract relief paintings with rich textures, mainly made of metal, which were a variation on material painting. Toward the end of this period, he created openwork forms in the shape of figures and three-dimensional metal sculptures. The next stage of his career spanned the years 1962–1974, when he devoted himself primarily to drawing. In the 1960s, he drew figural compositions in pen and ink, characterized by caricatured deformations of the figures. From the late 1960s onward, he created drawings in charcoal and colored pencils, which served as a monochromatic counterpart to his parallel work in painting. From 1974 onward, he devoted himself almost exclusively to painting. His distinctive style was based on technical perfection, accompanied by an extraordinary vision. He painted a world after a catastrophe, marked by the stigma of death and decay. His paintings are populated by figures and creatures that, while human or animal in form, possess the traits of phantoms, automatons, or decaying corpses. The artist did not give his paintings and drawings titles (apart from organizational symbols), thereby emphasizing his lack of interest in the literary aspect of his depictions. He himself said that when painting, he completely surrenders to his vision, “photographing” it. In recent years, he incorporated electronic image-generation techniques into his artistic practice, which he used to create computer photomontages. Beksiński’s art, which has been exhibited and discussed numerous times, evokes extreme reactions among experts and the public.
The largest, systematically expanded collection of his works in Poland is housed at the Historical Museum in Sanok; abroad, it is located in Paris, in the collection of Piotr Dmochowski, who has been collecting and promoting the artist’s work since 1983. He organized solo exhibitions of Beksiński’s work, including at the Galerie Valmay in Paris in 1985, 1986, and 1988, as well as a permanent exhibition at his own Galerie Dmochowski—Musée-galerie de Beksiński, which operated from 1989 to 1996. It was also under his auspices that the artist’s monumental albums were published in 1988 and 1991.
In Poland, a monograph on Beksiński by Tadeusz Nyczek was published by Arkady in 1989 (second edition in 1992). In the spring of 2005, a major exhibition of Beksiński’s paintings took place at the Abbots’ Palace in Gdańsk Oliwa, and Wiesław Banach, director of the Museum in Sanok, published a comprehensive monograph on the artist.
Since October 2016, the Nowa Huta Cultural Center in Kraków has hosted a permanent exhibition of 250 works (paintings, drawings, and photographs) by Zdzisław Beksiński from the private collection of Anna and Piotr Dmochowski. Since June 2021, a permanent exhibition of 30 paintings by Beksiński from the Dmochowski collection has also been on display at the Archdiocesan Museum in Warsaw.
(photo: Piotr Dmochowski, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8960820)