Edward Krasiński
Edward Krasiński was born in a Polish aristocratic family. In 1939, after the Soviet invasion of Poland, the family fled to Cracow, where Krasiński attended the German State School of Applied Arts. His first works, created in the 50s, were illustrations for magazines and surreal erotic drawings. In the 60s Krasiński moved to Warsaw, where he met the many artists and art critics who established the Foksal Gallery in 1966—among them Anka Ptaszkowska, who remained his avid supporter and friend through all of his life’s turns. Krasiński’s work at the turn of the decade into the 70s is neither
exactly minimalist nor properly conceptual: “suspended” or “linear” sculptures are flawed by the use of color; found objects—books, bottles—are mixed with fragile common materials such as rubber, wire and string; occasionally letters or sequences of numbers appear, making the work’s apparently clear geometric “cut” is a mere cheat. In the late 60s blue scotch tape became Krasiński’s medium and trademark material. The thin blue line running at the height of 130 cm was first pasted around trees and across pigsty walls in the village of Zalesie near Warsaw, but soon it stretched across gallery windows on the Paris Rive Gauche. Since then the artist has used the blue stripe in his “axonometric drawings” and “interventions” from the 70s and 80s as well as in numerous site-specific installations in museums, galleries and various other private and public spaces. Krasiński was a close friend of Henryk Stażewski, the nestor of the Polish avant-garde. This witty and independent figure invited Krasiński to share his studio and apartment on the thirteenth floor of a socialist housing block in the center of Warsaw. Krasiński continued to live in the apartment after Stażewski’s death in 1988. Inhabited and “directed” by Krasiński, the apartment underwent constant artistic transformation, a changing “mise en scene” of sculptures, photographs and found objects. Occasionally Krasiński would invite some friends in order to share his new ideas and jokes with them, deceiving them slightly and then endeavoring to get them out of the apartment again. A.S.
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