Nowosielski is a painter of dreams, of visions, of sacred madness. He says of his art that it is a reflection of the struggle between the angel and the devil in man. He creates a world that for many is an area of peace, serenity and happiness, but at the same time coexists with gloomy visions of hallucinations towards which the artist's inspired madness leads.His landscape paintings evoke visions of childhood, afterimages of unknown events, of a particular mystery, while his nudes are created on the verge of eroticism and death. And all of this in some indefinable melancholic, minor tonality, with a high amplitude of ups and downs.Jerzy Nowosielski has been an outsider since childhood – a dreamy, alienated nature, and thus the target of derisive attacks from his peers. The parents, after the tragedy of losing their two older sons, spread a tight security blanket over little Jurek. The boy spends most of his time at home, in the company of adults. He is a serious child, over mature, immersed in philosophical and religious reflections. As a teenager, he learns the art of icon writing.“This was the first time I encountered great art in such concentration and in such quantity. The impression was so strong that I will never forget this encounter. Watching, I simply felt physical pain… I was unable to move from one room to another ," he writes after seeing the icon exhibition in Lviv.In 1940, he began studying painting at the Kunstgewerbeschule, which he continued after 1945 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow.The first Exhibition of Modern Art in Krakow, in which he takes part, is met with a reluctant if not hostile reception from the public. Nowosielski exhibits together with Marian Bogusz, Tadeusz Brzozowski, Zbigniew Dłubak, Maria Jarema, Tadeusz Kantor, Alfred Lenica, Jadwiga Maziarska, Erna Rosenstein, Leonard Sempoliński, Henryk Stażewski, Jonasz Stern, Jan Tarasin, Jerzy Tchórzewski, Teresa Tyszkiewiczowa, Andrzej Wróblewski and many other artists. As he tours the exhibition, he uses a trick – he pulls the skin of his right eye towards his ear with his index finger. He says he adjusts his iris[1]. This way he discharges negative emotions and charms the audience.In the face of the ubiquitous post-war colourism, these attempts at modernity are a landmark phenomenon, although also already somewhat anachronistic, as similar trends had emerged in the West thirty years earlier.Nowosielski is separate, creating on the margins of the avant-garde. The famous “Exhibition of Eight”, organised in Łódź in 1956, brings both criticism from the public and even more threatening invectives from the avant-garde. Progressive artists see Nowosielski as a mere imitator of Modigliani. Julian Przyboś writes about his work using the term “little pictures with figurines”.[2]Nevertheless, Nowosielski is successful. In 1954, the National Museum buys Pigeon House for its collection. The artist takes part in international exhibitions, including the 1956 Venice Biennale. There is a growing interest in art from behind the Iron Curtain in France, Italy and in the UK. Nowosielski will make a brief appearance in this international circuit. However, the West will primarily look for provincial imitations in Polish art, to reassert its superiority. Painting such as Nowosielski's, created at the interface between West and East, remains incomprehensible and quickly loses its magnetism in the eyes of European critics.At the same time, in 1957, the artist took up a position at the Faculty of Textiles of the Lodz State Academy of Fine Arts. He remained associated with the university for three years. Students flock to his studio, although his painting is so infectious that the didactic effect is mediocre. Everyone paints “Nowosielskis”. Eventually, the university terminates its relationship with him on the pretext of him not having a degree. At that time, the artist moves to Cracow to take up the post vacated by Professor Jerzy Fedkowicz at the Faculty of Painting of the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts. He will remain associated with the university for the next thirty-three years.Nowosielski's landscapes are striking in their autonomy of form. Each plane is self-contained, carved with a definitive contour. Broad backgrounds contrast with fine forms. Huge areas of fields, meadows or sky are juxtaposed with miniscule houses, trains, cars. Everything is homogeneous, geometric, integrated by colourful contrast. There is no modelling or chiaroscuro, making the space lose its reality and become conventional, naively magical. The colour and the individual brilliance of the objects are almost crystalline. We get the impression that the space is refracted in prisms, disected into rhythmic segments vibrating with pure tone. The images are intersected by lines: vertical, horizontal, diagonal. They build tension and add rhythm to the composition, but at the same time, it is hard to resist the impression that the landscapes are lazily swaying at a largo pace.The first city he paints is Łódź. For a long time, the reminiscences of Łódź will be legible in his cityscapes. The blind walls, the factory chimneys, the uniform street frontages, the tram rails escaping into the depths of the paintings – they remind us of Utrillo. In many of the paintings, we find the tonality of red factory bricks, which the artist calls Lodz Gothic.Already in the early 1950s, Nowosielski paints vigorous, massive gymnasts, synonymous for interpreters with the shabby communist eroticism. In the margins of this oeuvre, dismissed by the censors of the time as pornographic, he practises a kind of exhibitionism, exposing latent, perverse fantasies. He says that his fascination with the body is accompanied by a sense of limitation, of passing away, of gravitating towards nothingness. His nudes from this period are somehow tragic – devoid of explicit sensuality. In them, eroticism merges with metaphysics and death, cruelty and sadism permeate the realm of sexuality. The artist even panders to his dark fascination with tortured, tormented female bodies. Perhaps these are obsessive visions from the years of occupation, when the first naked bodies he saw were corpses. In these works, Nowosielski vents his manic fears, a mixture of elation and death.Shown publicly for the first time in an exhibition at the Starmach Gallery in 2001, these works shocked the public. Nowosielski the icon painter revealed his dark side in them.His “attraction to the abyss of being” mellows with time. After a period of doubt, declared atheism, and turning away from faith, Nowosielski turns to esoteric readings, including the texts of German occultist painter Bô Yin Râ, as well as Rudolf Steiner and Helena Blavatsky. He speaks of “subtle entities”, spiritual intelligences. “An angel, angelos in Greek,” explains the painter, “is a messenger, that is, someone who sends certain content from other areas into our consciousness. And if the painting is successful, then the painting is a realised angel”[3].In his later years, his dream becomes to raise the body from decline, to sacralise corporeality, to elevate sensuality to a higher level of consciousness. His nudes retain a trace of torture, a tragic tension, a desire for redeemed sexuality, a longing for the Platonic union of two souls, and body and matter at the same time. In the nudes presented at the Kordegarda, created at this stage of his work, the figures are the inversion of icons – faces without eyes or with empty black eye sockets, bodies often devoid of the attributes of sexuality, as if they have already passed into a heavenly state. Nowosielski then paints rectangular nudes, which he bends in elaborate acrobatic poses or cuts with sharp lines-scars, as if from a scalpel incision. He also creates black nudes. These bodies are in some sense degraded, devoid of eroticism. The series is entitled “Memories of Egypt” and the painter says of them: “This is the Old Egyptian debauchery, which I have recalled after many millennia…”[4]“… In my artistic action, or at least in my intentions, I take the opposite route, that is, I try to elevate the most infernal elements of Eros, to restore their metaphysical, spiritually positive sense. This is due to the nature of my both faith and consciousness, but of course, it is my individual case,” he wrote to Tadeusz Różewicz.[5]Nowosielski's vision is very separate, almost Byzantine, full of sad bewilderment. There is no simple mimesis here, only a sign, a symbol. Space is never illusory, but symbolic, as in icon painting, which refers the viewer to another dimension.[1] K. Czerni, Nietoperz w świątyni. Biografia Jerzego Nowosielskiego, Cracow 2011, p. 111.[2] J. Przyboś, Sztuka abstrakcyjna. Jak z niej wyjść, in: A. Stankowska, “Wizja przeciw równaniu”. Wokół popaździernikowego sporu o wyobraźnię twórczą, p. 217, Polemika Krytycznoliteracka w Polsce, vol. 4, Poznań 2013.[3] K. Czerni, Przegrana bitwa, „Tygodnik Powszechny” 2011, no. 10. This article appeared as part of the supplement “Farewell to Jerzy Nowosielski (1923-2011)”; https://www.tygodnikpowszechny.pl/jerzy-nowosielski-stulecie-urodzin-142460 [accessed: 13.04.2023].[4] K. Czerni, Nietoperz w świątyni…, op. cit., p. 177.[5] T. Różewicz, Z. and J. Nowosielski, Korespondencja, Cracow 2009, pp. 214–215, in K. Czerni, Malarz w piekle. Walka z manichejską wizją rzeczywistości w myśli i sztuce Jerzego Nowosielskiego, “Nowy Napis Co Tydzień” 2020, no. 51; https://nowynapis.eu/tygodnik/nr-51/artykul/malarz-w-piekle-walka-z-manichejska-wizja-rzeczywistosci-w-mysli-i-sztuce [access: 28.03.2023], [original spelling].Katarzyna Haber, curator of the exhibitionOrganizers: Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, National Center for Culture, Kordegarda. Gallery of the National Center for Culture