Stefan Gierowski

Who is Stefan Gierowski?

Stefan Gierowski is a Polish painter and an avant garde artist of post-war Poland.

For many years he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw where he earned numerous distinctions. He abandoned representational and realist painting midway through the 1950s and devoted himself entirely to abstract and optical effects. Acknowledging the concreteness of materials and colors, the artist, by his own admission, is mostly intrigued by the dual nature of light, how light is enclosed within a painting and yet somehow escapes it. According to the artist, each painting has a structure and a framework based on physical laws until it leaves the studio and becomes an enigma, at the disposition of the viewer, who discerns its content through a combination of emotional response and introspection. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow from 1945-48 under noted artists of the time, Zbigniew Pronaszki and Karol Frycz. From 1946 he lived in Warsaw, and from 1962–96, he was a professor at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Warsaw. His paintings hang in major galleries in both Europe and the United States and in many countries throughout the world.