Edward Krasinski

Edward Krasiński was born in 1925 in Luzk (also Lutsk), Poland (now Ukraine). From 1940 to 1942 he studied interior design and graphic design at the Cracow School of Applied Arts and from 1945 to 1948 painting at the Academy of Fine Arts there under Władysław Jarocki, Wojciech Weiss and Józef Mehoffer. During the German occupation, he met art theorists and artists of the later so-called Second Krakow Group (including Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Nowosielski and Tadeusz Brzozowski). In 1954 Krasiński moved to Warsaw and in 1966, together with other artists, including Tadeusz Kantor and Henryk Stażewski, he founded the Foksal Gallery, which became the most important place for contemporary art in Warsaw at that time. From 1970 he lived in the studio of Henry Stażewski, with whom he had a lifelong friendship. In 1970 Krasiński participated in the 10th Tokyo Biennale and in 1978 in the 43rd Biennale di Venezia in Venice, Italy. Numerous gallery exhibitions in Poland were followed by retrospectives, in 1996 at the Kunsthalle in Basel and in 1997 at the National Art Gallery in Zachęta. In 1998 the artist received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Polish section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). In 2006, the Generali Foundation, Vienna, presented the exhibition "Edward Krasiński. Les mises en scène" and the artist for the first time in a solo exhibition in Austria. In 2016-2017 Edward Krasiński was honored with a major exhibition by the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, and the Stedelijk Museum, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Edward Krasiński lived and worked in Warsaw, where he died in 2004.

Edward Krasiński can be considered one of the most important protagonists of Poland’s Neo-Avant-Garde. In 1966, he was one of the founders of Galeria Foksal in Warsaw, which was famous for its progressive, international program of exhibitions. In its manifesto, titled Wprowadzenie do ogólnej Teorii Miejsca (An Attempted Interpretation of the Theory of the Place), Foksal members suggest that instead of an artwork, an exhibition itself becomes a fact. A work conceived as unique is subordinated to the exhibition, consequently functioning as one element among many.
In the Socialist era, the venue came under constant threat of political censorship. The photographs by Eustachy Kossakowski from 1969 show Krasiński grappling with a mass of tangled cables, which the artist appears to have lost control of. With humor and irony, the action titled J’AI PERDU LA FIN!!!
(I Lost the End!!!, 1969) illustrates the attempt to overcome anxiety with laughter. In a flyer, Krasiński made the following appeal to the public: He “had lost the end” and whoever found it should contact the Galeria Foksal in Warsaw.
Krasiński’s art has its roots in Surrealism and Constructivism. In the mid-1960s, he created sculptures from painted wire and wood, which he reduced to one line. His conceptual process, with its performative characteristics, develops in a playful direction: In 1968, he discovered a blue commercial Scotch tape, which subsequently became the signature of his art. He applied the tape at a fixed height of 130 cm to objects, walls, and even people, thus unifying everything marked by the line into a whole and integrating it into his system. Employing simple means and gestures, Krasiński creates an awareness of the interconnectedness of world and art. (Marijana Schneider)