The Fantastic Art of Beksinski

by Zdzisław Beksiński and James Cowan

Book Overview

The beautiful and bizarre imagery of this popular Polish surrealist is now collected in an elegantly designed treasury. 60 color illustrations. 10 photos. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 188339838X
• ISBN13: 9781883398385
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: Morpheus International
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 9.3" x 12.0"

Customer Reviews

Disturbing, thought provoking...and beautiful

Beksinski grew up in WWII and postwar Poland, his art clearly reflects this influence in his life. Pictures wrought with bones and post-apocalyptic imagery fill this book to the brim. He has such a gift for intricate details, a picture of a skeletong playing a trumpet, the trumpet is made out of hundreds of bones, and one can not tell where the hands end and the trumpet begins. But, the minute details of the bones and the main character itself are just wonderful. The book also gives a teaser in the end of some of his later digital works, pieces that I hope we get to see more of. Beksinski is definitely dark...but belongs on the shelf right next to Geiger and Barlowe.

Awesome

People have compared Bekinski's work to Giger's but I really don't think they're that similar, other than a theme of organic buildings and alien landscapes. Giger's work is all about sex and machinery, but Bekinski isn't interested in making any kind of statement, he's purely interested in the imagery, which is why I think I relate to him more than any other professional artist. Anyway, about his work, it's stunning. It takes you out of this time and place and into a far past or future of old dry dead things which are somehow still alive and aware. It's morbid and it's beautiful and I've found it to be extremely inspiring.

My latest inspiration.

I'm not about to start making comparisons to other artists of similar subject matter (like H.R. Giger, whose work was one of my first inspirations), but since seeing my first Bekinski painting literally yesterday, I have been enthralled by his unparalleled mastery of the dark. You get a few glimpses of world War II in his works - just enough to perhaps guess as to what served as his inspiration - but his work goes much, much further than simply portraying the horrors of war. From trees of desiccated limbs, covered in age-old spiderwebs, to similarly skeletal monolithic constructions, foreboding in their mysterious ultra-human purpose, there is a merging of dead life and non-living objects, so that often one hardly knows if one is looking at a rock that has been given the shape of a bone or a dried tree limb, or rather a bone that has degenerated to such an extent that it has come to resemble a piece of wind-blown slate.The artist himself has often reiterated that his paintings are not references, and that reading meaning into them is a waste of time; indeed, all of his works bear a single name - "Untitled." But to me, this means simply that there are all but infinite layers of meaning in Bekinski's crazed paintings - ones that invite the onlookers to define the art for themselves, and by doing so, lose themselves in the twilight of the infinite corridors of Zdzislaw Bekinski's imagination.

Bizzare and Beautiful!

The artwork of Zdzislaw Beksinski is absolutely stunning. The images that are conjured in this book are so original and different. Beksinski has an eye for detail and the sheer uniqueness and ambiguity of his artwork really sets him apart from other fantasy artists/ surrealists. I highly recommend this book!

Surreal and haunting!

Wow. If you're looking for an art book that deals with surrealism, look no further than here! In my opinion Bekinski is the ultimate master of grotesque and morbid surrealism; i find his work to be far more fascinating than even Giger's. Bekinski's art is at the same time very dry, fragile, and above all, ancient. The high amount of abstraction in Bekinski's work is what makes it so alluring. He doesn't put portray his ideas and concepts explicitly, and therefore his art is open to interpretation. His compositions involving twisted, organic, corpse-like heaps actually remind me of my own artwork, so this book resides in a sentimental place in me. Buy this book now.