The Brooklyn Rail

Popularized by the twentieth century avant-garde, geometric abstraction with its long line of eminent proponents often reads like the ABC of Modern Art. With Beyond the Line: From Finite to Infinite, From Physics to Metaphysics, Joachim Pissarro and Alma Egger step out of line: their two-person-exhibition at Fundacja Stefana Gierowskiego in Warsaw, Poland, traces the artistic kinship between Stefan Gierowski (1925-2022) and Sean Scully (b.1945)—the former Polish; the latter of Irish descent—who have honed in a similar visual vocabulary rooted in geometric shapes, forms, and lines.

Gierowski was a critical figure in Polish modernism. Drawn to light, optics, and the metaphysical, he crafted his geometric forms with an almost scientific precision. Meanwhile, Scully made a big mark in 1970s/80s New York, where he developed a distinct grammar of bold stripes and vibrant blocks of color that moved away from concepts of perfection and towards a humanizing abstraction. His richly textured linescapes are intuitive, exploring themes of identity and perception.

At Fundacja Stefana Gierowskiego, these two artists commune for the first time through their paintings and drawings. Spanning the second-floor galleries of the foundation, the exhibition occasions what unites both painters ideally, formally, and visually. Rather than basing the selection and display on facts of chronology, the curators premised the exhibition on a fictitious first-time encounter.

As such, Beyond the Line is first and foremost an exercise in compare and contrast. From their fascination with color and light, to their geometric compositions; their meticulous application of paint; or their experiments with different grounds. For example, in Painting DCCXXXV (1998) or Painting DCCLXXXVI (2002), the surfaces in Gierowski’s canvases are textured and gritty, relaying a precise and intense study of light and color. Meanwhile, Scully’s brushstrokes appear spontaneous and energetic. It doesn’t seem to matter that the colors in his lines blend and bleed into each other. In fact, the Irish painter has long painted on metallic surfaces, a technique that changed the texture of his paintings making them appear wetter for longer.

Within the exhibition, these comparisons manifest in the form of energetic pairings: for example, the succession of Painting CDXVII (1977), Colored Landline (2003), Landline Red Bridge (2014) and Painting DV (1983) is exceptionally pleasing. Tinged in luminous shades of red, this configuration highlights the two painter’s foray into chromatic lines and how their free-flowing hands and ductus have evolved over time. Elsewhere, the juxtaposition of Scully’s Mooseurach Floating Painting (2001-03)—an oblong-formed grey block—and Untitled (Wall of Light, 2015)—one of his famous grids featuring the six primary colors—followed by Gierowski’s Painting DCCCXCIII (2012) allows for a more playful reading: here, the linear succession of the three paintings both in form and colors reads almost like a mathematical equation, as if to say 1 + 1 = 2 in the painted form.

Yet the visual and formal analogies of these paintings distract from the fact that a twenty-year age gap, as well as differing historical, social, and cultural circumstances, undergird their respective creations. Pissarro and Egger bridge these discontinuities with forays into the painters’ idealistic kinship, from semi-formative travels to Paris in the 1960s to a shared sense of resistance—a sentiment that strikes a particular chord with the local Polish audience, whose country has been marred by numerous partitions and occupations in the last hundred years alone. Nonetheless, the twenty-year age gap tampers these comparisons. For example, both artists undertook respective formative trips to Paris: Gierowski in 1960, and Scully in 1969. Yet, within a decade as short-lived and tumultuous as the 1960s, their experiences would have been very different—not only because Gierowski made a transition from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, whereas Scully, coming from the British capital at the height of the swinging sixties, visited the French capital shortly after the political rupture of May 1968, with its seven-weeks long political protests. As such, these artists were confronted with an entirely different palette of cultural experiences, from their personal impressions of the city to its ever-changing politics, arts, and culture. Yet the curators find alignment in the fact that Paris left both artists cold as a form of resistance: Scully never oriented himself around trends and movements of his day, carving out his own niche instead. Gierowski would—until 1949 (at least)—turn to print publications featuring the latest trends in art, such as Pablo Picasso, alongside recent developments of the Młoda Polska (Young Poland) period (1890-1918) in the final years of the Partition of Poland, with the intent to rebuild the Polish arts and culture, following years of partitions, occupations, and effective demolition of the local arts and culture.¹