Jan Lebenstein. Promenade

April 27, 2012 - June 30, 2012

"The exhibition's very title suggests a slow perusal, a delightful escapade, a stir of excitement brought about by Jan Lebenstein's oeuvre. The thirty pieces forming this unusual retrospective hark back as far as the late 1950s-early 1960s, the time when the most refined art connoisseurs of New York got fascinated with the Axial Figures. One only has to mention one of the period's greatest collectors Albert Grokhost who would simultaneously acquire works by Marc Rothko, Egon Schile and ... Jan Lebenstein thus amassing a collection which anticipated the fascination with Central Europe in the 1980s.

Jerzy Kosiński, who had just debuted in New York, became truly fascinated by Lebenstein and his codes as if they had presented him with a vision of his yet not-written Painted Bird. The Promenade exhibition is an instant revelation: with a single brave gesture it unveils the essence of Lebenstein's oeuvre, its multiple embodiments in the Axial Figures (from the geometrical ones to those informed by Art Informel to the signature figuration of the late Figures from the early 1960s) and the drawings and gouaches from the painter's private and personal carnets intimes kept simultaneously while working on the Figures, here shown to the public for the first time."

Piotr Kłoczowski

 

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