Kazimierz Mikulski (1918 -1998), Multiple Portrait, 1994

xerotype, watercolor, paper, 30 x 24.8 mm, signed p. d.: 'K Mikulski 94', l.d.: 'Xerox + color'

He began his studies in painting before WWII at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, and continued them from 1939-1940 under Prof. Fryderyk Pautsch at the kunstgewerbeschule, established during the occupation in place of the academy. After the war, he completed two years of acting studies at the Drama Studio at the Old Theater in Cracow and worked as an actor until 1948. At the same time, in 1945, he graduated from the Youth Film Workshop. from 1948 to 1979, he was the art director and set designer of the Groteska Theater in Cracow, for which he designed puppets, costumes, decorations, etc. At the same time, all the time he was engaged in painting and activity in the circle of Tadeusz Kantor, at first as a member of the group of Young Visual Artists, and from 1957 in the Krakow group, of which he was co-founder and president in 1965-1967. He was also a member of the Cricot 2 theater group, acting, among others, in the productions of the water chanter, the overbears and the crocodiles, the Dead Class and in his own play Cyrk. In his paintings from the second half of the 1940s, the artist depicted light, linear forms floating in empty spaces. It was a painting that was both surrealistic and abstract. But already ca. 1950 he began to paint in his characteristic way of rejecting abstraction, he presented countless variants and arrangements of several favorite motifs (head or figure of a woman-doll, cats, butterflies).