Flaunting Szafki: a retrospective of paintings by Yusef Szafki (1950-2021)

About

This retrospective is the first exhibition to attempt a survey of his life’s work. As such it gives an overview of his experimentation and his ever-developing concerns with form, tone and texture. The exuberance and the humour in his oeuvre is best appreciated in such a broad cross-section. This allows themes, long-term intentions and even obsessions to be followed at length, exploring how Szafki overturns and refashions them over time with sudden and unexpected changes in methods and materials.
Born and raised in Glasgow as the only child of a Russian émigré, Szafki was heavily influenced by literature in his visual art. In an endlessly creative life, he published two literary works, including one on engaging with the Russian/Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol (60 Degrees N. (Diary of a Madman), 1996). Arguably the bold, dreamlike, exaggerated style of Szafki’s work is influenced heavily by the personality of Gogol and his writing in such stories as ‘Diary of a Madman’ and ‘The Nose’. The title of this exhibition – Flaunting Szafki – draws on one of the pieces Szafki published in his own collection of stories Helsinki (Not the Town), 1995, and it encapsulates something of the boldness and joie-de-vivre seen in the themes and subject matter of his paintings.
According to co-curator Professor Johnny Rodger of Glasgow School of Art,
“It is often said of Abstract Expressionism that the question ultimately for them all - be it Pollock, Frankenthaler, Rothko, Motherwell, Dzubus - is when to stop? When, if ever, is the canvas completed? Here we are, with an exhibition and a catalogue, flaunting the complete Szafki, but the work itself, arguably busier than that of any of those artists named above, with incessant trialling and reworking of the mark, the pattern and the composition in colour and form, is an endless flouting of the very possibility of finality.”