The Fantastic Art of Beksinski

by Zdzisław Beksiński

The beautiful and bizarre imagery of this popular Polish surrealist is now collected in an elegantly designed treasury. 60 color illustrations. 10 photos.

Genres: Art, Horror, Nonfiction, Art History, Art and Photography, Polish Literature, Photography

80 pages, Hardcover

First published December 8, 1998

About the author

Beksinski was a renowned Polish painter, photographer, and sculptor who is best known as a fantasy artist. He executed his paintings and drawings either in what he called a 'Baroque' or a 'Gothic' manner. The first style is dominated by representation, with the best-known examples coming from his 'fantastic realism' period when he painted disturbing images of a surrealistic, nightmarish environment. The second style is more abstract, being dominated by form, and is typified by his later paintings. He was murdered in 2005.

Reviews

[Fereshteh · Rating 5 out of 5]

اگه قیامت و آخرالزمانی باشه، بدون شک تکرار نقاشی های بکسینسکی در عالم واقعیت خواهد بود

نقاشی های سوررئال و کابوس وار که خیره شدن بهشون حسی ناگهانی ازافسردگی و مرگ و پایان دنیا رو به قلبتون پمپاژ می کنند.اسکلت..بیابان..خشکی..خرابه ها...نبود هیچ اثری از زندگی همه المان هایی هستند که به وفور در آثار بکسینسکی دیده می شوند

[Chuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beksinski was a VERY gifted artist. Not just in talent, but in mind, too. He was very connected to the unconscious self and reflected these in his absurdly vivid and dreamlike paintings. It's not too surprising that he would rail against symbolism or abstract "meaning" granted by the artist to the painting, and I'm pretty glad that he didn't symbolize with his work. He's one of the few surrealists that I've liked for that very reason.

Each piece has its own inherent truths belonging to an otherworld that somehow reflects the truth of our own reality - it is volatile and temporal, yet surrounds an underlying, eternal absolute, and strives toward it no matter what happens.

I'm sure this book is worth many enjoyable hours of staring-at that I have yet to get around to.

[Sara Alaee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A full 5 stars because of the fantastic artwork, the brilliant use of colors and the surprising dream-like paintings.

P.S. OK I can't deny that I felt bad at some points while looking at the pictures. Horror's still not my type!

[Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is surprising that Beksinski is not a household name in the West, like Dali or Geiger. His apocalyptic imagery is a more nightmarish vision of the world than that of the Surrealists, perhaps closer to the world of the Baroque, and it hardly comes as a surprise to learn that - as a child, just after the war - he badly injured his left hand unscrewing the head of a mine. His paintings have a very Central European quality about them, like Grunewald’s “Issenheim Altarpiece”. There is something about them that suggests the chaotic that lies just under the surface; bodies in the rubbish pile (like Zbigniew Cybulski in the last moments of Wajda’s “Ashes and Diamonds”). There’s even a suggestion of ethnic cleansing. Crumbling cities, whole cemeteries thrown up, tombstones, mutated semi-human forms scuttling with bandaged heads through burning cities. His murder, by the son of a close friend in an argument over money, has quite an ironic touch to it.

[A.P. Sweet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beksinski has no equal when it comes to putting emotion into the painting. No other painter moves me as much as he does. Even though literature wasn't his medium to communicate in, he uses language like a paint brush. His philosophy and insight is something to take with you everyday. A true artist and an inspiration for my work.

Rest in peace and thank you for your gift.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This man is amazing! His use of color is brilliant. I greatly enjoy the carnage look to all of his work. I wish I could rate this book a 10! I would seriously plaster my walls with his artwork if it would freak the hell out of my roommates. :}

[Damon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remember, kids: someday you too could survive the most costly war in human history and become the best dystopic surrealist ever known just to get shanked to death in your apartment by a teenager over $100.

[Juushika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Art primarily from Beksiński's "fantastic realism" period, ~1960s-80s, with a few examples of his later work. I love this artist and his bewitching nightmarescapes. He has the most remarkable organic greebling--a texture like hands/bones/branches/roots/veins which stretches across faces and buildings indiscriminately, thus uniting organic/inorganic, alive/dead, personal/public. It's uncomfortable and intricate, an exceedingly effective body horror and an invitation to linger over the details of the alien landscapes. (His later paintings are brighter and sometimes simpler, and I generally don't find them as evocative; his digital manipulations are thematically similar but unfortunately show their age.)

"In a dream, you can see a man who has a piece of raw meat instead of a head. This man is lying on the ground and actually growing into it, all the while carrying on a conversation with you. This situation (from a dream of mine) is not surprising or terrifying to you. It is a normal enough dream. It is only after you awake and analyze the details, that you notice that almost everything in the dream was strange and would have been terrifying if you had encountered it in your waking hours. It is a literal vision, but at the same time, blood is not blood here, pain is not pain, crime is no crime, and there is nothing to protest against, as it would be equally meaningful to protest against the fact that snow is falling."

But insofar as the benefit of picking up a print volume rather than browsing the artist's work online is print quality, accessibility, and curation, this is ... just okay. I enjoy lingering over a physical print, and the image quality is fine. But thick borders steal real estate from large paintings and the quotes from interviews, etc., while insightful, grow overbearing and are chock full of unfortunate typos. An imperfect imprint, but a beloved artist, and I'm glad I took the time to really sit with his art.

[Amber Robbins · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his own personal quotes he mentions having dreaded the noise and job of being in construction. He was a shy timid man, proclaiming his art was a portrait of his soul. If so, his soul was anguished. He also makes a remark as if illustration is a lesser art despite also admitting he was never formally trained in art. Had he been, he would have learned that illustrators bust their backsides harder than any other form of artist. You can plainly see where and how his learning in architecture directly effects the art he makes as well as his social anxiety and past anguished childhood. The body of art presented in this particular collection is worth looking at. As for reading, there isn't much text to read. But what is there, tells you all you need to know to "understand" why his work looks the way it does.

[Morpheus Lunae · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing first: This book is out of print and despite having had a few reprints it's quite expensive. Therefore it's not a great entry point to the works of Beksinski, unfortunately.
The reproductions and the printing quality are "passable" at best even though the format itself is nice and large for the collection of mainly oil paintings of his "fantastic period" in this book. However, the best thing this book has to offer are the various snippets and quotes from Beksinski interspersed with the reproductions. Those were quite a delight.

[Sara K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing imagination.
Its not only the fantastical and surreal images, but the technique itself that is utterly unbelievable. Out of this world. The details, use of light, and the way textures weave into each other are nightmarish and beautiful at the same time.

The digital compositions I'm more unsure about though lol

[Minotaur Mangum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant paintings though I would've wished for more of them. The book is a bit slight. But it's less a star due to the text, featuring quotes from Beksinski, who like most artists is loath to explain or define his work. These are riddled with typos.

[Zhermen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I have my own world, which if I paint it, can be a nightmare in your eyes. Similarly, some consider discoteques a hell, others, the gates of heaven. What I paint is above all else, a spiritual self-portrait of me.”

[Bskee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, haunting.

[Blake E · Rating 5 out of 5]

my favorite artist

[Sparrow · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a goddamn icon. Taken from us too soon.

[Yamen Saimouaa · Rating 4 out of 5]

When you mix depression, drugs and shit ton of talent you get something like this

[Mike Bodak · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing artist.

[Max Sargeson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The art of Zdzislaw Beksinski is particularly interesting because by painting these grotesque, fantastic and surreal scenes in such amazing detail he drew attention to the limits of our visual perception; it's my theory that when we are looking upon the portrayed scenery of representative artworks the largely subconscious process by which we evaluate their degree of realism and believability is not so much one of picking up upon the individual fine details; blades of grass, eyelashes, dappled shadow etc. all of which occupy no more than a fleeting instant of our visual memory, but rather seizing upon the notable incongruities whereby the depicted objects depart from our instinctive conception of their ideal and archetypal form, and it is when an artist, conscious of these limits to imagination that need to be respected in his endeavours still manages to impart such a degree of lifelike realism even to alien forms which never existed that he comes very close to opening to the viewer an accessible dreamscape whereby the figments of the artist's inner world can be felt on an implicit emotional level, as Beksinski said "I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams". Thus Beksinski's paintings, a tableau of realistic surrealism, have a degree of depth and transcendence which the relatively cartoonish work of Salvador Dali for instance did not achieve.

[Eric T. Voigt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Technically I looked at all the paintings and read select(ed at random) excerpts of the text about him and spoken by him.

[Stranded · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mesmerizing artworks, no one compares to Beksinski despair and horror dystopian surrealism