The colors of the city

First, on June 23, Leon Tarasewicz's Total Painting will be unveiled. The artist is one of most important Polish contemporary painters, although he was born in Walily near Białystok in 1957 to a Belorussian family. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and debuted in 1984 with a series of huge oil paintings which seemed to have no boundaries and looked like fragments of landscapes: endless fields, meadows, roads. Since then, his style has evolved into more abstract but equally vast and colorful paintings, and some open-air projects displayed in city centers.

For the last couple of years the artist has been specializing in covering huge spaces - facades of galleries or spaces on streets and squares - with long strips of paint in very vibrant and intense colors. He has also had numerous individual and group exhibitions all around the world. Despite his international career, he still lives in his native village, where he can fully enjoy the vastness and emptiness of the surroundings.

Among his best-known projects, Tarasewicz represented Poland at the 49th Venice Biennale of Art in 2001. The exhibition, which has just opened in Ujazdowski Castle, will be a continuation of his Venetian project. In his Total Painting project, the artist merges installation art and painting, which is composed out of pure concrete in three basic colors: red, blue and yellow. It occupies the entire floor of the Castle and some rooms require serious participation on the part of the viewer. As usual, in the project the most important aspects are the colors, which are supposed to overwhelm and inspire the audience.