Zbigniew Dlubak (1921-2005), MOVENS-5, 1965.

oil/board, 80 x 61 cm
signed, dated and described on the reverse: ZBIGNIEW DŁUBAK | "MOVENS-5" | 80 X 61 cm | 1965 | oil - wood.

Painter, photographer, art theoretician. Co-organizer and participant of the Modern Art Exhibition in Cracow in 1948. Co-founder of Group 55. Participant of the 1st Biennial of Spatial Forms in Elblag in 1965. Created cycles of works, both painting and photography. The formal search that brought the artist to the Movens series, initiated in 1965, was characterized by Adam Sobota: "[...] two painting series, Ammonites (1957-1963) and Anthropolites (1963-1965), in which the author increasingly objectifies and simplifies his painting forms. [...] In Anthropolites, the author already uses only rectangular stripes on a single-color background. The color of the stripes and the background is varied in such a way that it does not allow a purely emotional, "coloristic" perception of it. The forms of the Anthropolites seem to glow in places, and the color saturation of the background is not uniform either, while in the next series of Movens (1965-1973) the surfaces become smooth and uniform, and only the continuity of the stripes is interrupted and often differentiated by a different texture. Through the use of different color variations and arrangements of shapes, the paintings increasingly suggest existence within a system. This reaches its climax precisely in the series Systems [...]" (Dlubak: works from 1945-1980, February-March 1981, National Museum in Wroclaw [cat. exhibition], Wroclaw 1981, pp. 6-7). The researcher relates Dlubak's formal explorations to "an understanding of art history as successive phases, where in each phase art is a collection (system) of a certain number of variants of some principle" (Ibid., p. 7). Zbigniew Dlubak presented his first Movens at the Foksal Gallery in 1966. In the folder accompanying the exhibition, Hanna Ptaszkowska wrote: "The plane of the painting is covered with color of perfectly even saturation. Its surface is perfectly smooth. Sharply straight forms, shaped like an elongated rectangle, stand out from the colored plane. These forms resemble geometric figures, but they are not. Sometimes their outline forms a jagged line, or their basic direction is subject to evasions and bends. But even in cases of advanced irregularity - the form does not appear in the painting, as a trace of the free movement of the brush. [...] The plane of the painting is covered with oil paint. [...] The significance of this material context is reduced to a minimum. The painting gives a purely visual quintessence of color purged of its individual material quality, abstracted, as it were, from the material ground. [...] Zbigniew Dlubak solves the problems of new painting based on the traditional elements of painting (plane, form, color), but without the participation of traditional means of painting. He does painting without the participation of painting" (H. Ptaszkowska, [untitled], [in:] Zbigniew Dłubak. Painting, October 1966, Foksal Gallery PSP [folder], Warsaw 1966, p. nlb). It seems that Dlubak solved here not so much the problems of painting as purely visual issues. The painting allowed him to study the interplay of forms and differentiate the tensions between them on a flat surface. However, as early as 1965, at the beginning of the Movens series, Dlubak moved the experiment into the third dimension, giving it a monumental scale in a realization prepared for the 1st Biennial of Spatial Forms in Elblag in 1965. This time the pieces were not painted ribbons, but two sheets of metal, set vertically next to each other, which converge but do not physically meet. The forms optically enter into different relationships, depending on the viewer's point of view. Thus, the painting on display is part of not only a series of painterly realizations, a series of paintings under a specific title, but also part of Zbigniew Dlubak's entire theory of art, confirming the importance of the "system."