Zdzislaw Beksinski

Spooky Polish Painter

Earlier in this course we were looking at the master artist Francisco de Goya. I was personally very interested in his Black Paintings that he did near the end of his life. These paintings had very dark themes, depicted frightening scenes and were extra dramatic as they were painted directly onto the walls of his home. I was drawn to learn more about these mysterious images and quickly found myself on a Youtube rabbit hole of the worlds scariest paintings which lead me to Zdzislaw Beksinski.

Beksinski is a surrealist artist from Poland who specialized in hyper-realistic painting and photography. His images, like Goya’s, are filled with dark symbolism, sinister scenes, skeletons, flesh and monsters straight from my nightmares.

His life is filled with education, experimentation, war and ended with his murder ( a fittingly dark way to die for one of the darkest artists). 

Born in 1929, Beksinski’s early life was shaken by World War II and many symbols of soldiers and death riddle his works reflecting this part of his past in his pieces.

Beksinski studied architecture in Krakow, and while he never became an architect he did use what he learned to create massively detailed and accurate paintings of buildings.

After graduation he found work as a vehicle designer but found that this was not enough creative stimulation and decided to take up photography in his spare time.

He found an interest and connection between sadomasochism, fantasy and erotica – his photos using deep contrast in shadows and interesting cropping that lets the mind complete the image. He repeats the themes of hard wrinkles, intense textures, deep shadows and landscapes not only in his early photography but also in his paintings. I find these images to be very ominous and grim, I get a bad feeling in my chest when I look at them, which I suppose is the wanted outcome – to invoke a strong emotion. 

Beksinski later advanced to painting, critiquing that photography was too limiting for his creative vision and that he wished “to paint in such a manner as if (he) were photographing dreams,”.He started in abstract but found that surrealism better suited his imagination before again returning to the freedom of abstraction in his later years. 

He gained his popularity during his fantastic realism period where he painted in a “Baroque” or “Gothic” manner and used his signature precision to set him aside as Poland’s leading contemporary artist during the 1960’s. He painted surreal, post-apocalyptic scenes of deserts, monsters , buildings made of muscle and deformed figures. As Beksinski became a recognized artist he threw himself into his work and became very interested in his production. He was a very productive artist, creating hundreds of paintings, capturing hundreds of popular photos and even experimented with mixed media of paint and images. 

Beksinski was an artist with a strange personality. He refused to paint without the soothing sounds of classical or the heavy beats of rock, he never followed trends in art, he hated travelling and socializing (yet had a wife, children and group of friends). His images were all untitled and he never explained his paintings – arguing that they had no meaning or were in fact humorous (I beg to differ). In 1977 he burned a large collection of images because they were unsatisfactory or “too personal” adding to the overall mystery of his work. Beksisnki’s personality grew to be quieter and lonelier after the death of his wife in 1998. Only a year later his son, Tomasz committed suicide.

This is said to have been a factor in the grimness of his work. In 2005, Beksinski himself died in a tragic murder by his cleaning lady’s 19 year old son after he refused to loan the teenager money. 

Zdzislaw Beksinski was a great artist that pushed the boundaries of what art, surrealism and painting could be. He inspired many rock bands, the video game Tormentum and the award winning director and fan of Beksinski, Guillermo Del Toro in the film Pan’s Labyrinth.

 If you want to check out some art that is scary and relevant to our time you should look for Beksinski’s “Pandemic Series” though I wouldn’t recommend it.

• https://culture.pl/en/article/the-cursed-paintings-of-zdzislaw-beksinski