krajcberg by krajcberg
“As the present art refers to the mechanical world of an progressive material civilization, and their researches are tied to their machine, I address, with steadier steps, towards nature, which innumerable mysteries still attract me, even strongly.
Nature... my life has always been in her. Taking me away from men, I immersed myself physically in this eternal source of creativity, and undoubtedly, she determined my orientation, already ancient, anchored, deep within me. The forms I observed in the Brazilian rainforest, where I lived for a long time, its extraordinary exuberance in which I, paradoxically, debated myself, revealed its mysterious fascination.
And little by little, dragged by the organic richness of the surrounding natural forms, I turned my back on our mechanized world and my research fed on the unpublished forms found… But a desire for expansion, the need for a real explosion beyond the usual limits, the search for a third dimension of the work led me to use the projected shadow and I thus realize works that are not paintings nor sculptures: they are total works, trying to trap the space… The dynamic ambience that carries is reinforced by its chromatic texture obtained with colored soils of Minas Gerais. The use of natural colored stones and soil is, moreover, ancient in my paintings, as well as the impressions of natural forms on paper. Since human imagination is infinitely poorer than nature’s lavish creativity.”
“Man finds his true personality by trying to unite, as much as possible, with nature.”
Teilhard De Chardin
Catalog: “multipla galeria” - Brasil
Exhibition: Sculpture and Print Krajcberg
September 1972
biografia
Artist, sculptor, engraver and photographer, Frans Krajcberg was born in 1921 in Kozienice, Poland, and became a Brazilian citizen in 1954. His mother was an active communists and Frans saw his entire family being killed by Nazis in concentration camps at the World War II. In response, he enlisted to the Soviet Army as a bridge-builder engineer. After the conflict, he lived in Germany, where he studied between 1945 and 1947 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart and was Willy Baumeister pupil. He emigrated to Brazil in 1948,
initially staying in São Paulo, where he participated in the setting of the 1st "Bienal de São Paulo", in 1951. During the first years in Brazil he painted influenced by Cubism and Expressionism, in a synthetic design of low palette in which gray and earth tones prevailed. He remained in São Paulo until 1952, the year in which he would make his first solo exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art. In the countryside of Paraná, where he lived until 1956, Krajcberg moved away from the art circuit. In this immersion into the hinterlands of Paraná, the contact with nature offered him more sensitivity and new work materials.
In 1957, he won the Best National Painter award at the 4th Art Biennale in São Paulo and moved to Rio de Janeiro. At that moment, he alternated his life between Paris and Ibiza, with constant returns to Brazil.
However, the two-dimensional structure of painting was closing his horizons and, from a first experience in 1962, using natural soil from Ibiza, the artist felt an emerging need for change. He abandoned the pictorial dimension plane by replacing it with the three-dimensionalism of sculpture and relief. Gradually, Krajcberg was reformulating his own idea of representing or interpreting Nature through its appropriation. In an incessant investigation relating form and content, he uses organic elements from nature and the most different materials of mineral origin, in order to create relief, sculptures and installations with tree trunks, mangrove roots and printing in Japanese paper the marks left by the sea in the Nova Viçosa. In 1964, after winning the City of Venice Award at the 32nd Venice Biennale, Krajcberg visited Itabirito, and this moment marked his maturity as an artist.
Since 1973, he owned a permanent atelier in Nova Viçosa, on the southern coast of Bahia. His work can be seen in the most important museums of the world, as in France, Japan, Holland and Spain. He recently held three exhibitions in France, others in Brazil, and declined a proposal to permanently exhibit his work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York because they did not fulfill his request to privilege the struggle for the preservation of the Amazon Rainforest. The artist was honored by the mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë in September 2012, with the “Médaille de Vermeil de La Ville de Paris”, becoming an Honorary Citizen of Paris. The ceremony took place at the Hotel de Ville, and was attended by the members and admirers of the "Association des Amis de Frans Krajcberg" whose president is the artist Claude Mollard. In 2016, at the age of 95, Krajcberg was the main honoree of the 32nd Art Biennial in São Paulo “Live Uncertainty".
On November 15 of 2017, Frans Krajcberg passed away. His ashes were released in a tree in Nova Viçosa and all his patrimony, including his art-work, was donated to the State of Bahia government.
"If Mondrian wnt from the tree to the square, he only knew how to take advantage of one of the infinite possibilities of the tree. So, let's explode the square to find the tree again."
