User:Weronika99

Ksawery Sominski was born in 5th of August, 1923 in Milanówek, in the polish-jewish family. He graduated the faculty of history in the Uviversity in Antwerp and the Royal Academy of Art. After the studies he worked in bookbinder's workshop and in the Maritime Musuem’s archive, which wield enormous influence on his artistic work. He showed marine’s drawings and objects in 1960 on his first solo exhibition in Wide White Space gallery in Antwerp His first artworks – drawing collages with texts and graphical representations -referred to esthetic of Dadaism. He was especially influenced by its “ready mades”, transforming them into his own artifacts. The spirit of Futurism appears in Sominski’s fascination of technique and machines. This artist had peculiar attitude to technological progress. He suspects in its the causes of devastation of poetic contained in technical structure. In the middle of the sixties he started to create installations composed with many elements (like pictures, objects, photos) related to real events (f.ex. “Planes” 1964, “Zeppelins” 1966). This kind of artworks became the most characteristic for his artistic activity. In 1969 Sominski visited Austria. There he met Wolf Messing and Ted Serios and under their influence he began being interested in paranormal phenomena. In this time he created works about ships lost in Bermuda Triangle (1975) or mystery of Siberian Death Valley (1978). Walking along the fine line between historical truth and fiction he created his own original artistic style. His artistic activity exert an influence on many contemporary artists like Panamarenco or Luc Tuymans and Robert Kuśmirowski and Szymon Kobylarz in Poland. Sominski died 18th of April 1979 in car accident near Rawa Mazowiecka, driving from Graz (Austria) to Warsaw (Poland).

Engineer, poet, visionary, physicist, researcher, inventor. Ksawery Sominski -artist, which artistic work discloses a strange good terms with the irony of fate, intocacies of the history. He has taken up researcher role of „historical fiction” wishing penetrate and understand its secret by the arts. Through richness of collected, analysed and interpreted motives coming from various space-time dimensions generally known reality he tries to explore their real Being. Putting lonely „Ego” of dreamer with power of the Universe he tried to find a nature of bond between human being and the world, consolidating imagination within it. Sominski developed special unique artistic strategy. Using traditional medias (such as drawing or photograph) he comes out beyond generally understood role of the artist. He has taken on a role of historian, archivist, history story-teller, gallery worker, critic, exhibition designer, sociologist, collector, visionary, magician. He creates installations in which he includes archival elements or “ready-mades” into his own objects. His works are a fusion of artistic and technologic experiments. They oscillate between art and real life, historicity and fiction conducting game between autobiography and fictious. They resemble of gathered treasure and toys of young boy, drawings of mad engineer and designer, mementous of a freaky traveller or historian. Saying with words of J. Baudrillard they hide absence of deep reality. They take place on the boundary between presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, at the point of an intersection of dreams and reality. They make us aware of desiring of illusion and they deceive convincingly through uncovering of the reality.