Ladislas Kijno — Life and Work

Born in Warsaw on June 27, 1921, to a French mother and a Polish musician father, he grew up in a mining community in Pas-de-Calais. Naturalized French in 1954, he passed away in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 2012.

The painter Ladislas Kijno, a poet and philosopher at heart, is curious about everything.

From a very young age, he drew and painted what surrounded him. Known for his canvases, but especially for his crumpled papers, the artist began his career in the mid-1940s, honing his skills in Germaine Richier’s studio.

His works from the 1950s and 1960s, such as the series of pebbles, interferences, white writings, and others, established him as a major figure of the Second School of Paris. A friend of poets, whose texts he often accompanied with his paintings, he continuously paid tribute—through his canvases—to the personalities he admired: poets, painters, philosophers, musicians, and more.

Deeply humanist and politically engaged, Ladislas Kijno also found in artistic creation a means of struggle. His work denounces wars, supports women’s rights, and honors the fights of international figures such as Angela Davis, Pablo Neruda, or Nelson Mandela—the works grouped under the labels beacons and standards.

Always refusing to choose between abstraction and figuration, his oeuvre is that of a free and versatile artist who left an indelible mark on the second half of the twentieth century.