Tomasz Ciecierski (born 1945, Kraków, died 2024, Warsaw, Poland) was a Polish painter, draughtsman and creator of artist’s books who had lived and worked in Warsaw for much of his career. He had developed a highly individual, distinctive practice rooted in observation, memory and the process of image-making. Drawing on photographs, notes, postcards, landscapes and fragments of everyday life, Ciecierski treated painting as a way of thinking through experience rather than simply representing it. His work often blurred the boundaries between documentation, recollection and invention, reflecting a sustained interest in how images are recorded, remembered and transformed.
Beginning in the 1970s, Ciecierski developed a series of so-called Alogical Paintings, characterised by open, sketch-like compositions that resist conventional narrative structure. Against largely white backgrounds, he assembled seemingly unrelated elements – figures, animals, landscapes, objects, lines, colour marks and visual notes – creating images that function as fields of association, not strictly representation. For Ciecierski, painting became a space in which seeing and not seeing, remembering and forgetting, reality and imagination could all coexist. Individual motifs could be moved, erased, repeated or recontextualized, altering their meaning and emotional resonance. The resulting works operate as complex visual structures in which unexpected relationships emerge between different elements, inviting viewers to navigate a shifting territory between observation, memory and fiction, making their own connections.
