Jan Tarasin
Polish painter of small counted objects arranged across the canvas like a language.
Jan Tarasin was born at Kalisz in Poland in 1926 and studied in Krakow under Zbigniew Pronaszko and Wacław Taranczewski. Working through the constraints of the post-war Polish art world, he arrived at a subject he kept for the rest of his life: collections of small objects — pebbles, seeds, marks, signs — arranged in rows and clusters across the surface, sometimes ordered and sometimes scattering, which he treated as a kind of notation for how things accumulate and are counted. He taught at the Warsaw Academy and served as its rector, wrote extensively, and died in 2009.
A market centred on Poland, where he is a major post-war figure, with growing attention elsewhere as Central European painting of the period is reassessed. Oils on canvas lead, with the works from the 1970s and 1980s generally the most sought. Tarasin also worked extensively in gouache, watercolour, drawing and printmaking, and photographed constantly; the works on paper are numerous and are the accessible part of the output. Titles are frequently numbered variations on a theme, so precise identification usually requires the reverse of the work.
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