Artur Nacht-Samborski, “The memory of motif”

“Wozownia” Art Gallery is holding an exhibition of Artur Nacht-Samborski’s works from the deposits of the National Museum in Poznan. This is a representative collection of works created from the twenties to the seventies of the twentieth century.

It covers all the motifs present in the work of the artist: still lifes, female acts in intimate interiors and landscapes. The artist treated those motifs as a kind of media. He presented them in ever new contexts, spatial and color combinations. Nacht compositions are characterized by the harmony of the whole. They show the painter’s artistic sensitivity to the nuances of color, which he skilfully combined with the ability of extracting expressive tones from them. Two traditions: Polish Colorism and German Expressionism contributed to the Nacht’s art. They have shaped his personal path to achieve his own unique style. The exhibition will be complemented by a lecture “Faces of Nacht-Samborski” delivered on January 28 (Thursday) by Łukasz Kiepuszewski.

Artur Nacht-Samborski was born in 1898 in Cracow, in a Jewish merchant family. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts — including the studios of Joseph Mehoffer and Wojciech Weiss, then spent several years in Berlin and Vienna, where he encountered German expressionism. In 1924 he left for Paris, where he lived and worked until 1939. He returned to Krakow, from where his family moved to Lviv. Friends rescued him from the local ghetto, after the escape he was hiding in Warsaw under an assumed name of Stephen Samborski (hence his subsequent name Stephen Artur Nacht-Samborski). After the war he was a professor of Sopot State School of Fine Arts (today’s Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk) and then for twenty years a professor at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (with an interval of 1950-52, when he was removed from work). He died in Warsaw in 1974.

The exhibition was organized in cooperation with the Artur Nacht-Samborski Foundation for Contemporary Art ARTek and National Museum in Poznan. Presented works come from the deposits of the artist’s family in the National Museum and private collections.

• Opening: January 8, 2010 (Friday), at 6 p.m.
• Exhibition: January 9-29, 2010

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