Franciszek Starowieyski (1930, Bratkówka near Krosno – 2009, Warsaw), "To Whom the Laws of Nature Do Not Apply," 1996

Condition
Work mounted

Exhibited
Painters of Kazimierz, Summer Salon ‘99, Vistula River Museum in Kazimierz Dolny, Kazimierz Dolny, August 15–September 26, 1999

Bibliography
Kiejstut Bereźnicki, Jerzy Duda-Gracz, Antoni Fałat, Zbysław M. Maciejewski, Franciszek Starowieyski, exhibition catalog, Górków Palace, Poznań, April–May 1999, p. 27, (ill.)

Biography
He came from a noble family bearing the Biberstein coat of arms. He completed his art studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and Warsaw. He gained popularity in the 1960s with a series of theater and film posters. He worked in painting, poster art, commercial art, and theater and television set design. His paintings are characterized by a fascination with the female body of “Rubensian” proportions, sensuality, and reflections on transience and death. In his “theaters of drawing,” he combined both arts into a single “spectacle of all arts,” a media phenomenon in which the act of creation itself, its theatrical elements, and—thanks to the artist’s erudition—its literary aspects hold equal artistic value to the work itself in the traditional sense of the word. In Starowieyski’s paintings, the real world merges with the creations of an “unbridled” imagination, and his work—which ostentatiously references the old 17th-century masters—is steeped in the grotesque and humor.