ORLIK
COSMOS OF DREAMS
HENRY ORLIK
COSMOS OF DREAMS
A REDISCOVERY OF GENIUS: LOCKED - UP DREAMS & MASTERWORKS
An Exhibition of Masterworks by Henry Orlik
Curated by Grant Ford
Maas Gallery | 6 Duke Street | St James’s | London |SW1Y 6BN 9 - 20 August 2024
The Little Gallery | 1-2 | The Parade | Marlborough | SN8 1NE
23 August - 6 September 2024
Henry Orlik, August 1982
In 1974 Henry Orlik’s (b.1947) work was included alongside great Surrealist artists such as René Magritte, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dali in Surrealist Masters (Acoris, The Surrealist Art Centre, Brook Street, London). In the years following the exhibition Orlik created some of his most exciting and dynamic work but due to his increasingly reclusive lifestyle many of these works have remained hidden and unseen.
Orlik’s work explores the breadth of human experience. His paintings, formed of thousands of tiny, spiralled brushstrokes, which Orlik refers to as his ‘excitations’, suffuse the solid and often monumental forms depicted with energy and vitality. Orlik took the term excitations from his reading on quantum physics as the term is used to describe the excited state of an entity reacting to a stimulus. Like atoms and electrons, the elements of Orlik’s work are full of energy and motion; undulating waves, rippling fabric, moving aircraft and writhing bodies create the impression that the canvas is in the process of rearranging itself into some new scene or figure.
These dream-like paintings examine the fluid nature of time, space, memory and experience and are not bound by rules of reality. His extraordinary, sensual and witty images cohere into seemingly rational worlds which somehow, by a trick of memory perhaps or déjà vu, seem strangely familiar and intelligible.
Recent exhibitions and scholarship have examined the spread of Surrealism beyond the boundaries of interwar France, exploring the influence of Surrealist artists and their ideals on postwar, international artists in Britain and beyond. Whilst André Breton’s Surrealist movement died with the onset of the Second World War artists such as Henry Orlik demonstrate that the artistic impulse to depict the unconscious and surreal extended further into the 20th century.
48 x 71 cm, 19 x 28 in
DREAM with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
50.5 x 60.5 cm, 20 x 23¾ in
GREEN STILETTO with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
DEFEAT (AEROPLANE OVER LA)
mixed media on card
79 x 52 cm, 31 x 20½ in
“All is flux, nothing stays still”
- Heraclitus (c.500 BC)
PARTING
THE
with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
122 x 86.5 cm, 48 x 34 in
END OF AN AFFAIR with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
66 x 48 cm, 28 x 21 in
with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas 104 cm. x 78.5 cm, 41 x 31 in
SURREAL LANDSCAPE
WIN OR LOSE with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
101.5 x 76 cm, 40 x 30 in
ANTICHRIST with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
180.5 x 220 cm, 29½ x 78½ in
TIME with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
70.5 x 53 cm, 27¾ x 21 in
‘They say I’m surrealistic. I just paint’
- Henry Orlik, 1972
91.5 x 60.5 cm, 38½ x 26 in
REST with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
KITE with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
76 x 66 cm, 35 x 30½ in
THE END
with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
162.5 x 96.5 cm, 64 x 38 in
CENTRAL
66 x 47 cm, 26 x 19 in
NYC-GRAND
with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
“My painting is visible images which conceal nothing…they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees oneof my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, ‘What does it mean?’ It does not mean anything, because mysterymeans nothing either, itis unknowable.”
- René Magritte (1898-1967)
BEVERLY
HILLS with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
73.5 x 56 cm, 29 x 22 in
FRIENDS
with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
30 x 40 cm, 12 x 15¾ in
81 x 106.5 cm, 32 x 42 in
BEAUTY AND SHARKS
with artist’s stamp verso
acrylic on canvas
180.5 x 220 cm, 34 x 28 in
OASIS
with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
‘All that is needed to produce a surrealist picture is an unshackled imagination’
-David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism, 1935
CANNON BALLOONS with artist’s stamp verso
acrylic on canvas
114.5 x 152.5 cm, 45 x 60 in
PARACHUTE with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
116.5 x 68.5 cm, 48½ x 29½ in
MOTHER FLIGHT
with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
114 x 101.5 cm, 47½ x 46½ in
HENPECKED
with artist’s stamp verso acrylic on canvas
76 x 56 cm, 30 x 22 in
SUKA with artist’s stamp veso acrylic on canvas
153 x 91.5 cm, 60 x 36 in
LOVERS
with artist’s stamp verso mixed media on card
87.5 x 57 cm, 30 x 22 in
FAIRGROUND
with artist’s stamp lower right
coloured crayon and pencil
35 x 35 cm, 19½ x 19½ in
SELF PORTRAIT
with artist’s stamp lower right
coloured crayon and pencil
42.5 x 34 cm, 29 x 27¾ in
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Early Years
Henry Orlik was born in Ankum, Germany two years after the end of the Second World War, in 1947. His father, Jozef Orlik (1923-1998) was Polish and in the Allied Armed Forces under British Command during the war. His mother, Lucyna was of White Russian (Belarussian) origin and amidst the horrors of Nazi invasions had been deported for slave labour and put in a labour camp in Ankum, Lower Saxony, where she worked as a farm labourer. Jozef was part of the Polish forces who spearheaded the advance after D Day in the spring of 1945 that liberated the occupied countries of Northern France, Belgium, Holland and finally in May 1945 into Lower Saxony.
The Orlik family came to England in 1948 and were initially itinerant, moving between different camps.
In early 1958 they arrived at Fairford Camp on the fringes of the Cotswolds, the largest of the many Polish Resettlement Camps operational from 1947 to 1958. They were here for two years and then were transferred to Daglingworth Camp in Gloucestershire. The young Orlik was sent to a Polish Boarding school in Hereford from the age of seven to twelve. The family stayed at Daglingworth until 1959, when, like many Polish families, they moved to Swindon.
In 1963 Orlik enrolled at Swindon Art College where he studied for three years, continuing his studies at Gloucestershire College or Art, Cheltenham between 1969 and 1972.
Orlik at Gloucestershire College of Art, Cheltenham
Career and Exhibitions 1970s
Orlik was already making a name for himself by 1971 when he showed People (gouache) at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1971. In 1972 he had a highly successful one man show at the world-renowned Surrealist Art Centre, Acoris, in Brook Street, London W1 when he was only twenty-five, from which all his paintings sold. An article in Apollo magazine stated, Orlik ‘has seized on a surrealistic idiom to display his hermetic vision of the irrational. Colours are muted and unearthly, giving a curious pallor to his enigmatic images, which are conveyed by innuendo and oblique implication. Intertwined female figures writhe in and out of one another in grotesque convoluted embrace culminating in a wild tangle of hair. Contrived theatrical stage sets occupied by the standard unexpected juxtapositioning of surrealistic devices are subject-matter for many pictures, as well as macabre landscapes. Orlik’s technical manner is to work over the surface with meticulous care, using minute strokes of a fine brush. The result is one of monotonous regularity that depersonalizes the surface but contributes to the eerie quality haunting his imagery.’
A review for the same exhibition in Ar t & Antiques magazine describes Orlik drawing much of his inspiration from ‘his heritage’ which was ‘regularly charged by frequent visits to his homeland of Byelo Russia, on the PolishRussian border’. It continues: ‘His works – in both oil and acrylic, one of them on glass – are technically brilliant and his observations, while cynical, scarcely lack humour. Despite the dream-like quality imparted by a network of infantile squiggles which characterise his paintings, Mr. Orlik firmly rejects any label. “Surreal?” he said, taking a long look around the walls of the gallery. “They say I’m surrealistic. I just paint. It’s a lucky break, though, if it wasn’t for this show I’d still be teaching.” At his private view last week 80 percent of the pictures were snapped up. It would be false modesty on Mr. Orlik’s part if he attributed that solely to luck – and I don’t think his publicity people will be referring to him as unknown for very much longer.’
Left: Orlik in 1972
1980 Onwards
Orlik lived and worked in the United States between 1980 and 1985. After a brief stay in Los Angeles, he mostly resided in New York, exhibiting in the 80 Washington Square East Galleries, New York University in 1983. Orlik was greatly influenced by his time in the United States. Many of the works painted in the 1980s contain monumental structures inspired by the American architecture such as the solid, Spanish style villas in California and the looming skyscrapers of New York City.
Orlik returned to London in 1985 but he took a stance against art dealers whom he saw as taking the lions’ share of the profits and about whom he took several swipes in his work. He sold his paintings privately but shied away from publicity and rarely exhibited.
Despite not showing his artworks publicly, Orlik continued to dedicate his life to his work, surrounding himself with his paintings.
Following a stroke in 2022 Orlik retired to Wiltshire.
Left: Orlik’s residence in Los Angeles, California 1980
Above: Orlik’s Studio in London
