A Glance on the Work of Zdzislaw Beksinski (With an Emphasis on Surrealism and Fantastic Realism): In the World of Dystopia

The present paper is a review of the work of the Polish designer, painter, photographer, sculptor, engraver, and printer Zdzislaw Beksinski. Using symbolic values in an allegorical, symbolic atmosphere on one hand, and utilising surrealism and fantastic realism on the other, he creates a ‘dark art’ in a dystopian world, presented to the audience as in contrast with the utopia. In order to get to the bottom of his concepts this paper tries to answer a key question: whether the application of these styles is an attempt to illustrate the dark, inhumane nature of his time’s political system or his work is inattentive to realities of his time and merely an indulgence in hallucinations of the mainstream Western surrealism and fantastic realism. The paper then moves on to argue, based on its findings, that Beksinski exploits these styles as well as a range of other techniques to express and demonstrate the formation of brutal dictatorships under which ordinary people have suffered and died. The fascist manners of his time’s political regime had indeed resulted in capturing exiled Jewish people, Polish political activists, Soviet POWs, European gipsies, and other allies’ POWs, and thereby caused Beksinski to reject his own earlier performance of abstract and formalist scenes and resort to a fully figurative spatial imagination: what his critics call ‘dark art’ or ‘dystopian surrealism’ and Beksinski himself takes as ‘fantastic realism’.