Art in relation (2009)

Exhibition 2009: Jan Niksinski shows works in Zwingenberg ,.Recycling 2″ takes up the works of ZWINGENBERG.

Art passes away, even if it is immortal. To give it life, the painter Jan Niksiński (57) from Warsaw has breathed new life into it. He entitled his exhibition. “Recycling 2”. Born in the district town of Przasnysz in the Mazovian Voivodship, 100 kilometres north of Warsaw, the artist studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk from 1973 and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1975. Since then he has remained loyal to the metropolis, with the exception of a one-year stay at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna as a scholarship holder of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research. For a short time there, he also worked in the theatre of Angelika Hauf. He later taught at the Summer Academy in Salzburg and worked in Graz. (as set designer at TheaterMëRZ) He has been an independent artist for almost 35 years. Certain patterns and colour combinations (light blue/ carmine red), as well as geometric lines and breakthroughs recur as leitmotifs in his works, some of which are large-scale ‘Servus Witkacy im kalten Landhaus’ is his main work centrally placed in the Remize, which invites you to enter the house. It is worth knowing who Witkacy was: he was the Polish philosopher, painter, writer and photographer Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939). He fled from the Germans to eastern Poland in 1939 and killed himself when the area had to be handed over to the Soviet Union.

Niksinski is also fond of citing the son of a Jewish pharmacist, Mark Rothko (Witz), who was born in Daugavpils in what is now Latvia. He too fled with his family to the USA after the Jewish pogroms of 1912 and became one of the main exponents of Abstract Expressionism. Rothko also took his own life ‘Rothko on the Varvian Beach’ is a 40 by 1.20 metre canvas painting featuring a photograph of a Bulgarian village. Last but not least, the artist reinvented himself: after 20 years, he revisited one of his paintings that he no longer liked and painted it using a technique that almost always allows something sculptural to emerge (an old picture frame, panels, stones). This created a deeper relationship between the painting and the viewer. At least, this is the opinion of 18-year-old art student Leonie Keicher, who studied Niksinski’s art intensively.