Artur Nacht-Samborski. Masks of Time
Visual identification: fragment of the work - Sketchpad Mastera staroy zhivopisi, ca. 1973-1974, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, © The Heirs of Artur Nacht-Samborski and Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź
Artur Nacht-Samborski. Masks of Time is an exhibition that takes the viewer to the late period of the artist’s work, stretching from between the 1960s to the mid-1970s. Many of his paintings from that time are devoid of the features of conventional portraiture and can be described as the images of “heads” or “masks”. Their uniqueness allows us to distinguish them from the artist’s entire oeuvre and consider them in the context of his life experience. “Each portrait,” as Hans Belting wrote, “wears the mask of the time that produced it.”
INFO
Place
ms1, 43 Gdańska St.
Time
Opening
Artur Nacht-Samborski was both a witness and a would-be victim of the Holocaust, a survivor and a saviour of others. Today’s sociology places him amongst the grouping of Jewish Poles. The exhibition aims – without limiting the interpretative possibilities of his work – to provide one of many answers to the question of how the painter “paid off,” in the words of his friend Adolf Rudnicki, the “debt that his imagination and memory owed to history.”
Nacht-Samborski concealed and effaced various aspects of his biography. With the exception of those closest to him, he hardly ever mentioned his Holocaust-era experiences to anyone, and he maintained a similar discretion with regard to his paintings, which he showed unwillingly and rarely exhibited. He never dated his works, and very seldom did he sign or title them.
Nacht-Samborski’s late paintings position him on the sidelines of Kapist colourism. In his heyday, he was much more of an Expressionist. Thus, the current exhibition focuses on the painter’s unique “power of expression” in the context of his “extraordinary life” (Ryszard Stanisławski). This is a narrative that leads us from the early examples of Nacht-Samborski’s dialogue with the avant-garde of the 1920s, through the early post-war years and a brief encounter with Socialist-Realism. We are then introduced to an evolution whereby “portrait transforms into a head-mask,” that is followed by an apogee – the idiom of a head or bust completely emancipated from individual features. It is at this moment when Nacht reached the “heights of sour, aphoristic simplicity” (Joanna Pollakówna).
The current presentation draws on the exhibition Artur Nacht-Samborski. From the Artist’s studio. Paintings, Drawings, Sketches, Photographs, Documents, held at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in October and November 1989 on the initiative of the institution’s then director, Ryszard Stanisławski. In the introduction to the catalogue, he wrote that the selection of works and archival documents had been highly unorthodox compared to earlier exhibitions of the painter’s work. The aim on this occasion was to enable the viewer to learn about the substance of the artist’s work “from the side of revelations, the most radical, visionary, thrilling solutions, when we think about the power of expression and concentration, unique in his [Nacht’s] generation of artistic decisions.”
The artworks gathered at the exhibition, in many cases rarely exhibited in public, have been sourced from museums and private collections. The presented archival materials and painting utensils, once owned by the artist, found themselves after his death in the hands of his heirs, friends, and state institutions.
Artur Tanikowski
Publication and organization of the exhibition entitled "Artur Nacht-Samborski. Masks of time" (working title)
Subsidized by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland
