Rajmund Ziemski

For a few decades he titled almost all of his works ‘Landscape’, distinguishing them by date and number only. One thing is certain: for Rajmund Ziemski, landscape art does not mean the depiction of idyllic natural scenery. This excellent colourist, student of Artur Nacht-Samborski, and one of the first recipients of the Cybis Prize, Poland’s most prestigious painting award, did not occupy himself with portraying nature. His paintings are consistently abstract, and – despite his gesture changing over the years – magically coherent in style. One series only seems to stand out: featuring perforated, ragged shaped painted with thick brush strokes, it is heavily inspired by one of Ziemski’s masters, Jerzy Tchórzewski. Ziemski approached portraits as landscapes of the soul: many of his works are anthropomorphic abstractions, vertical structures which one is prone to interpret as human figures, as opposed to the horizontal, or panoramic, compositions that most landscapes are. Some of his landscapes are concealed, too: all you see are drapes or curtains hanging inside the frame as if you were at the theatre or opera house waiting for the show to begin, or watching a performance with the curtain down, because somebody forgot to raise it. In a way, this very well sums up all abstract painting: instead of revealing a picture to the beholder, it appeals to their imagination. Ziemski’s painting are ‘conjectural landscapes’. This is what he said of the landscape: ‘You may savour its colour or formal harmony, or think of it as a creation of our senses and reflect on the passage of our human affairs.’