Tadeusz Myslowski

born 1943

Polish-born American artist

sculptor, painter, graphic aritist. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Since 1970 has been living and working in the USA.

Myslowsky"s formation comes from the Eastern European abstract traditions, especially Russian and Polish Constructivism and American Minimalism. He has been involved in variuos multimedia installations, light and sound projections, film animations and photography:

Shirne for an Anonymous Victim at Majdanek Concentration Camp

Cross Over – searing mediation on the events of September 11^th

His work has been influenced by the European constructivism while owing also much to his fascination with the art of Malevich, Mondrian, Strzemiński, as well as to his delight with the architecture of New York. Using simple signs: a point, line, cross, square developed into a cube e shows a relation between the geometry"s precision and the metaphysics, the universality of the laws of nature.

His career has gone through several stages by then: study at Cracow and for a while in Kiev (where he developed an intrests in the post-revolutionary avantgarde and Malevich"s Suprematism(, then he lived in Łódź, where he learned the alphabet of Abstract art by going to the Art Museum to see the classic works of new art, several trips to Paris somehow completed the development of his artistic consciousness.

Settling in US meant the beginning everything anew. Myslowski found himself fascination a cultural and psychological barrer – starting a different life, revising his system of ideas, values and habits was painful. For Myslowski, bidding farewell to his old life meant new experiences, above all of an intellectual nature, and a new spatial reality do different from what he had left on the other side of Atlantic. Upon his view of a city with its structure growing over the centuries, was now superimposed another: a geometrical, linear organisation, an evidence of dynamic life of the city with a short history. It made a strong impression  on the newcomer, almost shocked him, but it also simulated him to a fruitful, artistic reconsideration of space. To make things clearer, let us try to sketch the spatial configuration that Myslowski found in Manhattan.

On his first visit to Manhattan"s Avenue of the Americas/Sixth Avenue, Mysłowski was overwhelmed by the myriad glass boxes/skyscrapers, that become the inspiration for his work. For him, these skyscrapers, in their minimalism, where simply sets of building materials – stone slabs – embodying the spirit of the new age.

Myslowski comes from he European geometric and abstract traditions – especially the disciplines of Bauhaus and De Stijl, Russian and Polish Constructivism, American minimalism and Mandelbrot"s fractonal geometry.

Over 22 years Myslowski created 10.000 images.

Towards Organic Geometry

interpretation of the growth and radical alternation of Manhattan"s skyline along the Avenue of the Americas. His images of the Avenue of the Americas" rigid grid structures are transformed by chemical means into asymmetrical, organic, curvilinear forms. In Towards Organics Geometry he venture into new zone – the infrastructure of photography – to observe and question the transmutations of the photographic process.

Avenue of the Americas (1983) proved that the method of space modeling developed by the founder of Neoplasticism was still valid. It was an obvious continuation of the beginning of the century – Suprematism and Constructivism.  Myslowski began a graphic record of the spatial code at the point where his predecessors had stopped. A significant factor in this study on the diffusion of architectural structure was the fact that he used special cameras and high-tech equipment, that enabled him to make the range of visual perception incomparably wider.

The essence of his visual investigations was philosophical in nature, concerned with eternal oppositions in nature and in the life of a community – lasting and passing by, growth and decay, creation and destruction.

Cross

Myslowsky"s spatially modeled cross is, so it seems, far from the cosmogony of Suprematism, but it is somehow connected with its philosphy – through the  artist"s origin, his biography, and artistic tastes, For this reason, one tends to draw irritional associations and thinks n terms of concepts from the language of religion and music. But the work id still rooted in the topographic reality of Manhattan. The cross, now seen and photographed at an angle, reached various degrees of deformation.

Such deformed crosses, presented at first individually and then combined into groups of eight – in various configurations and arrengements, streched in all directions, asymmetrical, shaped freely without any center of gravity, building a new imaginary space – belong both to the domain of structure and to the language of poetry. Apart from that, the cross has symbolic connotation within a city, within its specific, compact structure, the archetype of a city is circle with a cross within it – the way in which a city was denoted in ancient Egipt.

The cross in the grid of Avenue of the Americas – both are the products of the same civilization.