Julian Stanczak

Julian Stanczak lost his right arm in the Gulag labour camp

Julian Stanczak was born on 5th November 1928 in Borownica in Poland. At the start of the First World War, he was deported to Siberia where he was forced into hard labour under inhumane conditions. Compulsory labour, malnutrition and beatings led to the loss of the use of his right arm – for a right-handed artist, a heavy burden on the path to painting. Stanczak circuitously ended up in a Polish immigration camp with his family in Uganda where he painstakingly learnt to write and paint with his left hand. In 1948, he travelled to London, studied book illustration at Borough Polytechnic Institute, and then emigrated to the USA in 1950. In Cleveland, Ohio, he studied with Josef Albers (1888–1976) and Conrad Marca-Relli (1913–2000) at Yale University and acquired his Master of Fine Arts. He received his American citizenship in 1957 and was a teacher at the Art Academy of Cincinnati for seven years.

Co-founder and important representative of Op Art

With his participation in the exhibition Artists of Southern Ohio in Dayton Museum of Art, Julian Stanczak won not only his first prize, but also awakened the interest of gallerist and art dealer Martha Jackson (1907-1969), who invited him to exhibit in her gallery. This solo exhibition under the title Julian Stanczak: Optical Paintings, was a decisive influence in establishing a new art movement, which the painter and architect Donald Judd (1928-1994) characterised in a two-word statement as “Op art” in his critique of the exhibition. The breakthrough brought the much-acclaimed exhibition The Responsive Eye one year later in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Stanczak was also represented. With this, he found himself unexpectedly at the pinnacle of a style which had arisen out of the traditions of the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism.

The exploration of colour as the birthplace of light

In his own words, Julian Stanczak was interested as a painter above all in colour. He viewed it as the birthplace of light, an equally very concretely private as well as abstract and universal experience. He saw the ability to capture the movement and variation of form, colour and light as the essence of his art. The longer he studied something, the more secrets he could reveal, the artist said. Hereby, he worked with geometric structures which he often repeated in light or subdued colours in whole series, such as the 50 large format panels from the series Windows to the Past. In 1963, Stanczak married the artist Barbara M. Meerpohl, who is known as a sculptor under the name Barbara Stanczak. The couple have two children, Danusia and Christopher.

Julian Stanczak died on 25th March 2017 in Seven Hills, Ohio.