Aleksander Kobzdej - Polish Abstract Painting
Aleksander Kobzdej (1920–1972) was a Polish painter. He was born in, what was then, Ukraine. Kobzdej is best known for being one of the most prominent representatives of the Polish Social Realist group, and for being the creator of unique Polish versions of «matter» painting.Kobzdej began studying architecture in 1939 at Lviv. He finished his degree in Gdansk Polytechnic Institute and later studied under Wladyslaw Lam at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts.Kobzdej started off as a Post-Impressionist. His works eventually became more abstract. Toward the end of the 1940s, he exhibited bits of European Realism. «Signs of impending change appeared in Kobzdej's work at the beginning of the 1950s in a series of drawings he produced as an outgrowth of his travels to China and Vietnam (1954). These works demonstrate his interest in means of expression that do not reflect reality, and transform it instead into art. The artist abandoned the narrative bareness of representation opting for more subtle means of expression in both his paintings and drawings. His final abandonment of Socialist Realist iconography became evident in the series of paintings titled Gęstwiny / Arrays (1955). Towards the end of this same decade, the painter traveled around Western Europe.
