Presentation
French painter, born in 1921 in Warsaw (Poland), from a Polish father and a French mother. He moved in 1925 with his parents to Nœux-les-Mines (59) where he spent his childhood. He died in Saint Germain en Laye on November 27, 2012. Ladislas Kijno produced his first artistic works in the early 1940s, while simultaneously studying philosophy at the University of Lille. After the war, he attended the studio of Germaine Richer. In 1957 Dor de la Souchère, friend of Nicolas de Staël and Pablo Picasso, organized the first major Kijno exhibition at the Antibes Museum. Kijno moved to Paris in 1958. Painter of insubordination, poet, philosopher, Ladislas Kijno expresses his fights, his rebellious poetics, his doubts, his emotions in the energy, the excess, the extreme sensitivity, the humanism of works with a poetic and spiritual breath. After his first works with figures and violins, Kijno evolves towards abstraction. Constantly in search of new means of expression, he experimented in the 1960s (well before the fashion for Street art) with spray painting. He invented the crumpling technique, with his famous ”crumpled papers”. Ladislas Kijno worked a lot in series. Countless tributes inhabit his creations: Nicolas de Staël, Rimbaud, Arthaud, and illustrate his fights alongside oppressed peoples, Mandela, Angela Davis. He was also the friend of poets (Aragon). His numerous travels had a great impact on the painter and his work. He represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1980 and produced many important frescoes and mosaics participating in various architectural projects including the famous stained glass window of the Rosace of Notre Dame de la Treille Cathedral in Lille (1990) cause and breaks in style, refusing to remain a prisoner of definitions and categories, he allows himself to navigate freely between abstraction and figuration, creating a personal world of signs and curves that draw a modern mythology. For LAD as his friends nicknamed him , ”painting is a job that kills, one way or another, you have to lose your skin”. To discover: the work of a major artist of informal painting of the XX°s. present in many museums in France and abroad as well as in many private collections.
