Boguslaw Szwacz, Untitled, 1993

mixed technique, paper, 29.5 x 37 cm (light passe-partout)
signed and dated l.d.: Szwacz 1993

provenance: private collection, Warsaw

Boguslaw Szwacz (1912 - 2009) In his youth he was associated with the Borderlands. Born in Leżajsk, he graduated from Krzemieniec High School. In 1930 he began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow under Ignacy Pienkowski, Karol Frycz and Jan Hoplinski. During his studies he focused mainly on realist painting. He graduated with honors in 1937. After the war, he began working at his alma mater, which he left in 1949 in favor of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. He remained in close contact with the Group of Young Visual Artists. At the turn of 1947/1948, he was on scholarship in Paris, where he made friends with André Fougeron, Edourd Mignon and Fernand Léger, among others. He became a member of the group "Le Surrealisme Revolutionnaire."

Szwacz's paintings featured imagery based on the grotesque deformation of the human figure. In the era of socialist realist doctrine, he created in accordance with the ideological assumptions of this trend, surprising the public in 1955 with an exhibition at the Union of Polish Writers. It turned out that in addition to his official work, he worked on very personal abstract painting, showing states of his spiritual consciousness. With the beginning of the 1960s, the artist's painting was clearly oriented towards the idea of Ars-Horme art.

He grouped the paintings he created under the theory of the Art of Moving the Imagination into varieties called arshormeograms, ars-hormeographs and ars-homeogryphs. The assumptions of the Ars-Horme theory resonated most fully in his manifesto delivered at an open-air workshop in Osieki in 1977. Boguslaw Szwacz participated in significant exhibitions of avant-garde art, including the First, Second and Third Exhibition of Modern Art in Warsaw (1948/1949, 1957 and 1959), exhibitions at the Krzywe Koło Gallery in Warsaw (1962 and 1963), the First Biennial of Spatial Forms in Elblag (1965), the "Golden Grape" Symposia in Zielona Gora (1973 and 1976). He was twice awarded the prize in the J. Spychalski painting competition (1974, 1975)