Optical Reaction: The Art of Julian Stanczak

“Stanczak…was one of the leading artists involved in the creation of the ‘Op Ed’ movement of the 1960s. His use of optical mixture and color interaction is considered one of the most sophisticated in the history of art.”

– Washington State University News

“Stanczak’s use of color can be thought of as continuing the work begun by the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, but distilled and intensified by Stanczak’s African experience… First and foremost, these paintings celebrate the pleasure of seeing.”

– Springfieldart.net

This extraordinary retrospective spanned 50 years of the prodigious creative life of Julian Stanczak, a founder of the 1960s Op Art movement. A student of Josef Albers, Stanczak developed a fascination with line, color, and abstraction, which he took to dazzling new heights. The Op Art movement was named in response to Stanczak’s 1964 exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York.

Born in Borownica, Poland, in 1928, Stanczak was imprisoned along with his family in a Siberian Gulag at the beginning of World War II; there, he suffered privations and abuse that caused him permanently to lose the use of his right arm. After escaping Siberia at the age of thirteen, he joined the Polish army-in-exile in Persia, then lived for several years in a refugee camp in Uganda, where he painstakingly taught himself to paint again with his left hand. The vivid, mercurial quality of the light in Africa—particularly the sunsets—influenced Stanczak’s sense of color; and his haunting memories of wartime atrocities moved him to explore the “anonymity of actions” through non-referential, abstract art. Stanczak’s spellbinding paintings use repetition, a vibrant surface, and complex modulations of color to express fleeting experience in the emotive language of light.

Optical Reaction featured 53 paintings and works on paper.

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