Stefan Gierowski (21 May 1925 – 14 August 2022) was a Polish painter and an avant garde artist of post-war Poland. For many years he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw where he earned numerous distinctions. He abandoned representational and realist painting midway through the 1950s and devoted himself entirely to abstract and optical effects. Acknowledging the concreteness of materials and colors, the artist, by his own admission, is mostly intrigued by the dual nature of light, how light is enclosed within a painting and yet somehow escapes it. According to the artist, each painting has a structure and a framework based on physical laws until it leaves the studio and becomes an enigma, at the disposition of the viewer, who discerns its content through a combination of emotional response and introspection. His paintings hang in major galleries in both Europe and the United States and in many countries throughout the world. Early years Stefan Gierowski was born on 21 May 1925 in Częstochowa, but grew up in Kielce, where soon after his birth the Gierowski family moved. He came from a family of intellectuals, his father, Joseph Gierowski, was a doctor whose passion for painting has played an important role in cultivating his son's artistic talent. Artistic traditions in the family were also strongly present thanks to the figure of Antoni Gierowski, Józef's uncle, who was a nineteenth-century painter and drawer. Patriotic traditions were equally important for the education of the young artist. From an early age, he showed interest in painting and a desire to perfect himself in it. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Stefan Gierowski together with his mother Stefania joined the Union of Armed Struggle (Polish: Związek Walki Zbrojnej, ZWZ), and later the Home Army (Polish: Armia Krajowa, AK) and actively participated in underground activities under the pseudonym "Hubert". In 1941, at the age of 16, he began underground artistic education under the supervision of Andrzej Oleś, a well-known Kielce watercolourist, which he was forced to interrupt in 1944 because of his relocation to the Częstochowa Inspectorate. Study period After the dissolution of the Home Army, Gierowski moved to Cracow, where he began parallel studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Art History at the Jagiellonian University. The experience of studying art history proved to be crucial for young Gierowski in broadening his thinking