HENRY ORLIK

COSMOS OF DREAMS|PART TWO

HENRY ORLIK COSMOS OF DREAMS

A REDISCOVERY OF GENIUS: LOCKED -UP DREAMS & MASTERWORKS

PARTTWO

An Exhibition of Masterworks by Henry Orlik

Curated by Grant Ford

The Little Gallery | 1-2 | The Parade | Marlborough | SN8 1NE

23 AUGUST - 6 SEPTEMBER 2024

VIEWING 10.00-17.00 MON-SUN (No appt required)

We are excited to announce that Henry Orlik: Cosmos of Dreams Part Two will be running as an online auction.

Our online bidding site will go live on Friday 23 August at 17.00 BST and will remain live until it ends at 18.00 on 6th September at which time no further bids will be taken and the auction will close.

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.

56 x 45.5 cm, 22 x 18 in

FORGOTTENLOSTHOPES, 1984

with artist's stamp verso acrylic on canvas

mixed media on card

76 x 53 cm, 30 x 21 in

ESCAPEII

CELTICSYMBOL mixed media on card

67 x 82 cm, 26¼ x 32¼ in.

“It has been said of dreams that they are a ‘controlled psychosis,’ or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.”

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), Valis 1981

THELANDLORD

extensively inscribed along the lower edge with artist's stamp verso acrylic on canvas

66 x 56 cm, 26 x 22 in

GRABOWSKI with artist's stamp verso acrylic on canvas

127 x 91.5 cm, 50 x 36 in

“My painting is visible images which conceal nothing…they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, ‘What does it mean?’ It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.”

- René Magritte (1898-1967)

RESTINGAFTERWORKSTUDY, 1974

with artist's stamp lower right pencil on paper

176.5 x 74.5 cm, 69½ x 29½ in

SOLDIERS with artist's stamp verso acrylic on canvas

53 x 43 cm, 21 x 17 in

MARTINLUTHERKING

x 35.5 cm, 18 x 14 in

with artist's stamp verso acrylic on canvas

45.5

FIGA with artist's stamp verso acrylic on canvas

45.5 x 110 cm, 17½ x 39½ in

90 x 81cm, 35 x 32 in

66 x 73 cm, 26 x 29 in

(Right) CONFUSION

with artist's stamp on verso acrylic on canvas

(Left)

FIRE,1974 with artist's stamp verso acrylic on canvas

‘They say I’m surrealistic. I just paint’

- Henry Orlik, 1972

INANDOUTOFJAIL

mixed media on card

88 x 60 cm, 34½ x 23½ in

WINTER with artist's stamp verso acrylic on canvas

90 x 62 cm, 35½ x 24½ in.

(Left)

STUDYFORANTICHRIST- FEMALE with artist's stamp lower right pencil and watercolour

55 x 83 cm, 21¾ x 32¾ in (Right)

STUDYFORANTICHRIST- MALE with artist's stamp lower right pencil and watercolour

50 x 99 cm, 19¾ x 39 in

60 x 30 cm, 24 x 12 in

WAT9,1966 with artist's stamp verso oil on board

MERRYGOROUND

mixed media on card

76.2 x 56 cm, 30 x 22 in

GROWTH

with artist's stamp verso acrylic on canvas

68.5 x 51 cm, 27 x 20 in

RUINS

acrylic on canvas

90 x 63 cm, 35½ x 24¾ in

SUMMERLANDSCAPE with artist's stamp lower right coloured chalk

29.5 x 41 cm, 11½ x 16¼ in

STILLLIFE

coloured pastels

127 x 69.5 cm, 50 x 27½ in

ESCAPE

mixed media on card

87 x 60 cm, 34¼ x 23½ in

ARCHES, 1987 with artist's stamp on verso acrylic on canvas

33 x 31 cm, 13 x 12¼ in

THELYINGPLANT

mixed media on card

91.5 x 66 cm, 36 x 26 in

with artist's stamp lower right charcoal on paper

35.5 x 43 cm, 14 x 17 in

SCORPIONSTUDY2

EMBRACE with artist's stamp verso wax crayon

48 x 27.5 cm, 19 x 10¾ in

DUNES with artist's stamp lower left pencil drawing

80 x 105 cm, 31¾ x 41½ in

HACIENDA, 1966 oil on board

60 x 74 cm, 23½ x 29 in

EYEHATCHING with artist's stamp lower right coloured crayon and pencil

32 x 32 cm, 12½ x 12½ in

lower right

69 x 52 cm, 27¼ x 20½ in

COMING SOON HENRY ORLIK

NEW YORK EXHIBITION 2025

“Nothing in the world can one imagine beforehand, not the least thing, everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen.”

- Nostradamus

FIGHTING SKYSCRAPERS, NEW YORK CITY

*Not available for purchase

Painted 1980-1984

acrylic on canvas

126.5 x 105.5cm

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 Art & 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.