Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Zdzislaw Beksinski

Zdzislaw Beksinski (1929-2005) was a was a renowned Polish painter, photographer, and fantasy artist.

His work reflected his preference for the obscure.His paintings concocted up odd images in the mind, and were a true step into absurdity in the field of dystopian surrealism.Beksinski was a very innovative artist, especially for one working in a Communist country. In the 1970s he entered what he himself called his “fantastic period”, which lasted up to the late 1980s. This is his best known period, during which he created very disturbing images, showing a surrealistic, post-apocalyptic environment with very detailed scenes of death, decay, landscapes filled with skeletons, deformed figures, deserts, all very detailed, painted with his trademark precision, particularly when it came to rough, bumpy surfaces.  Beksinski’s later years were ones filled with tragedy.  His wife, Zofia, died in 1998, and a year later, on Christmas Eve 1999, his son Tomasz (a popular radio presenter, music journalist and movie translator) committed suicide. Beksiński’s life reached a most brutal and melancholy end in 2005, when he was stabbed to death at his Warsaw apartment by a 19-year-old acquaintance from Wołomin, reportedly because he refused to lend the teenager money.Perhaps his art had always reflected the darkness that one day would reflect the end of his life.More of Zdzislaw Beksinski‘s haunting work can be found at https://www.shopbeksinski.com/