Stefan Gierowski (1925-2022) is one of the most important postwar European abstract painters. The exhibition ‘That’s How the Light Gets in: The Art of Stefan Gierowski’ was shown in July 2024 in CAFA Art Museum, Beijing. Recently Gierowski has been enjoying a great deal of attention. The Centre Pompidou has acquired one of his paintings and he was shown in last year’s Chengdu Biennale and in one of the opening exhibitions at the new Guangdong Museum of Art.

 

Stefan Gierowski had much more than a passing interest in Chinese art - he read Lao Tse and his interviews are punctuated with not only respect for and knowledge of Chinese art but also a recognition of how some of its features and loyalties confirmed his own judgements. 

The dominance of Western European and US art has meant that Polish art, like Chinese art, has not been given the attention it deserves. This exhibition has four elements: Gierowski was very interested in science and the first part of the exhibition will explore how his paintings engaged with science and with the earliest days of space exploration; the second part will explore his relationship with the idea of the void (drawn from Chinese philosophy); and the third section will look at his exploration of colour. The last section will showcase his watercolours.

 

Through all the sections runs the idea of light: light as a material property; light as a spiritual property; light as the condition of colour.

 

Gierowski was born into a distinguished family in Poland and lived and taught in Warsaw. But his paintings have always had an international life. His first one-person show was in Paris in 1961 and during his life he exhibited in cities as various as Belgrade, New York, Brussels and Buenos Aires. He was also in a very important exhibition, ’15 Polish Painters’ at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1961 and was one of the artists in the Polish Pavilion at the 1968 Venice Biennale.

The exhibition is curated by Philip Dodd who has worked with the Guangdong Museum of Art since 2016.