Bernard Braun (1935-2021), FLOWERING CACTUS I, 1979/80.

art fabric, dimension 150 x 100 cm
on the back a paper sticker with a faded description of the work: KWITNĄCY KAKTUS I | 1979/80 | dimension 100 x 150 cm | tech.application; address sticker

Painter and printmaker. Studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, receiving his diploma in 1961 from Czeslaw Rzepinski, a "wonderful colorist" - as Braun described his professor. An educator at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, he teaches painting at the Interior Design Department. In an interview, the artist confessed: "I don't know what abstraction is and I don't know what the term means. For my art, the impulse is the basic stimulus, and this impulse is nature, and even more so man, no matter what I do" (A painting is not used to cover holes in the wall. Interviewed with Bernard Braun by Jerzy Szach, "Dziennik Wieczorny" [Bydgoszcz] 1987, no. 192).
The recipe for Bernard Braun's painting-tissue could go something like this: we throw clippings of the most varied, colorful materials onto the canvas and, in the place where they fell, sew them to it. We can control the coincidence to some extent, and so the soft three-dimensional elements land in the center of the composition, forming peculiar piping. For sewing we use a zigzag stitch and thread of a contrasting color, which will not only mark the edges of the individual pieces, but give them a "spiky" look. Now it remains to give this exotic, "parrot-like" vision a title. Let it be: "Flowering Cactus."