Photo By Gail

Henryk Stażewski (1894-1988) was a Polish painter, considered to be a pioneer of the classical avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. Stażewski was a foremost representative of the Constructivist movement, as well as the co-creator of the Geometric Abstract art movement, and a member of the Cercle et Carré group of abstract painters based in Paris. In the second half of the 1950s Stażewski supplemented his visual language with a new element – the Relief.

This form would supplant pure painterly media in his art for the next twenty years. Initially his reliefs had a very loose structure and were built of colorful, rough-textured elements that referenced organic forms (Relief, c. 1955). His reliefs of the 1960s were characterized by elements covered in ‘half-tone screens’ that energized their surface by creating the illusion of vibration.  Color Relief was painted in 1963.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.