THE LOST SURREALIST: HENRY ORLIK'S QUANTUM REVOLUTION

THE LOST SURREALIST

HENRY ORLIK’S QUANTUM REVOLUTION

“I remember Henry as something of a loner and an outsider but one of the most uniquely gifted, stubborn, fearless characters I’ve ever met. He took everything to extremes, did nothing half-heartedly, and bounced from rags to riches and back again throughout his life.”

24 October 2025 – 14 March 2026

Public exhibition at

WINSOR BIRCH

The Fine Art & Sculpture Company Catalogue sponsored by

INTRODUCTION

By Katie Ackrill, Collections and Exhibitions Officer

When Winsor Birch’s exhibition Henry Orlik: Cosmos of Dreams hit the press in August 2024, word about Orlik and his astonishing work quickly reached the team at Museum & Art Swindon. We learnt about a young man who had arrived in Swindon in 1959 as part of the town’s large Polish diaspora, and trained at the Swindon School of Art. We learnt about a rising star, who established a reputation as an exciting and technically gifted artist, and showed his work alongside masters of surrealism. We learnt that his name and his work had become obscured, because he spent the next 50 years painting behind closed doors, quietly amassing an incredible body of drawings and paintings.

Now that Orlik’s work has been launched back into the public sphere, people are once again astounded by his dream-like worlds, fizzing and humming with the energy of his unique “excitations”. Referred to as a “surrealist master” and a “surrealist art star”, Orlik is now gaining the recognition he deserves.

The Lost Surrealist: Henry Orlik’s Quantum Revolution brings Orlik’s work to a public museum for the very first time, enabling a broader audience to discover and enjoy his talent, through a thoughtful selection of paintings and works on paper. As the home of a significant collection of modern and contemporary British art, Museum & Art Swindon celebrates Swindon’s creative heritage alongside the most iconic artists of 20th century Britain. It is therefore fitting that Orlik, with his national profile and local significance, is celebrated as part of our programme.

Museum & Art Swindon would like to thank Grant Ford and the hard-working team at Winsor Birch for giving a huge amount of time and experience to our partnership. We would also like to thank our generous lenders, for enabling us to borrow significant artworks from Orlik’s oeuvre and make them publicly accessible. Finally, we say a huge thank you to Henry Orlik, for allowing the world to find joy in his incredible creative vision.

FOREWORD

In early 2024, I experienced something that transformed my life and changed my career forever. I was confronted with extraordinary and striking paintings unlike anything I had seen in forty years in the art world, including my thirty years at Sotheby’s. These paintings vibrated with electric energy; they were covered in thousands of tiny, precise spiral brushstrokes that seemed to record consciousness itself. I was looking at the work of Henry Orlik, a name I had never heard, an artist the world had forgotten.

Henry Orlik, born as a displaced person in 1947, spent over forty years developing what he calls “quantum painting” in complete isolation. While the art establishment moved on without him, he quietly revolutionised how paint could capture the vibrating energy of thought itself. Drawing from quantum physics, he understood that matter at its smallest level exists in constant vibration. His paintings make this invisible energy visible, creating surfaces that pulse with life even when depicting personal struggles. Each mark represents what he calls “qi: a cosmic spirit that vitalises all things.”

This wasn’t just abstract theory but lived experience, rooted in childhood memories of stained-glass windows at Fairford Camp casting “amazing reflections and shadows on the floor”, patterns of light that influenced his art for decades. Having always appreciated the Pre-Raphaelites and their meticulous application of beautiful glazes, I wonder: what would they have thought of Henry’s work, with its equally careful detail and deep meaning?

In 2022, Henry suffered a devastating stroke that ended his ability to paint. The following year, a bureaucratic catastrophe struck: decades of his final works were “removed and disposed of” when he was evicted from his London flat. An entire chapter of revolutionary art vanished. Yet from this loss has come recognition, arriving not a moment too soon for an elderly and frail artist. The tragedy intensifies the triumph.

Since first viewing Henry Orlik’s paintings in 2024, I have been fully immersed in Henry’s world, and his remarkable work has now featured in many major publications and been displayed from London to New York. One prominent institution has acquired a piece for its permanent collection. International recognition has come, showing that delayed genius is not denied genius.

Henry rarely signed or dated his works; they remained deeply personal to him, and his rejection of the commercial art world made them even more secretive and intimate. This creates a fascinating juxtaposition: an artist desperately wanting to be received yet standing his ground against a system with which he could not compromise. Every mark in his painting is implicitly his autograph. The dating of the works remains an ongoing, changing process as we learn more about this artist who has been reclusive for over forty years.

Our collaboration with Henry occurs at a remarkable moment for Surrealist art worldwide. The centenary of Surrealism has garnered unprecedented scholarly and institutional interest in the movement. There is strong demand for exceptional Surrealist works exemplified in the outstanding sale of Pauline Karpidas’s collection in September 2025 at Sotheby’s London, just a short walk from where Henry had exhibited alongside masterworks by Magritte, Ernst, de Chirico, and Dalí at the Acoris Gallery in Brook Street during the 1970s.

One cannot help but wonder had Henry been embraced by the right dealer and nurturing agent back in the 1970s, had someone like Pauline Karpidas encountered his work during her legendary collecting years, his story might have been different. Karpidas’s sale indicates the significance of Surrealist works and Henry’s technical mastery and philosophical depth easily match those of the Surrealist masters, whose works are considered priceless.

Henry’s mature work has developed into something entirely original: a visual language that captures the quantum mechanics of consciousness itself. The United Nations has declared 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, recognising that quantum thinking is transforming everything from computers to communications. Henry was exploring these ideas in art long before they entered mainstream conversation. His “excitations”—those thousands of spiralled brushstrokes—generate energy fields that go beyond traditional surrealist imagery.

Henry’s quantum method transforms everyone who encounters it. His paintings demand patience; you must slow down, look carefully, and learn to read consciousness made visible. A few visitors at the London and New York exhibitions were drawn to tears, not from sentimentality but from recognition. They discovered an artist who reveals the deepest currents of human experience, demonstrating how small changes in attention and awareness can lead to profound transformation.

Alistair Amos, a clinical psychologist, visited our first show in London in 2024 and has followed the renaissance of Henry’s work since. He wrote to me: “I was enthralled by Henry’s story and his mesmeric worlds. I find something deafening that echoes in Henry’s art which is mirrored in his own story and our societal world of cultural and systemic matrices, constructions, rules and interdictions which protect and trap but also shape us. The biopsycho-social effect this has on our behaviour and on our mental health are significant. Henry reminds us that we should pay greater care and attention to those around us, and the responsibility we have to advocate for others who may be at risk of abuse and neglect not just from individuals but from faceless systems.”

This exhibition has been immeasurably enriched by the scholarly research of Sara Clemence, who has worked with me for nearly a decade as academic writer and researcher. Sara’s patient visits to Henry have been fundamental in discovering more about this enigmatic artist. Despite Henry’s natural wariness, Sara has forged both intellectual and emotional connection with him, bringing moments when his eyes brighten and lucid memories surface, revealing the depth of thought behind his revolutionary method.

I would like to express profound gratitude to Katie Ackrill and her exceptional colleagues at Museum & Art Swindon for their unwavering support in bringing this historic exhibition to life. Their commitment demonstrates the very best of curatorial vision and institutional dedication. I also thank my colleagues at Winsor Birch for their unwavering support throughout this challenging and extraordinary journey.

This exhibition represents profound historical significance: Henry Orlik’s first public loan exhibition, taking place not only in the town where he spent his childhood but also at one of Britain’s true hidden gems. Museum & Art Swindon houses what Art UK describes as “one of the most remarkable collections of its kind outside London.” Artists in the collection include Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Graham Sutherland, L.S. Lowry, Paul Nash, Terry Frost, Howard Hodgkin, John Hoyland, Richard Hamilton, Gwen John, Augustus John, Maggi Hambling, and Grayson Perry. These are some of my most cherished British artists, and the fact that Henry’s revolutionary quantum paintings now join this extraordinary company feels like destiny fulfilled.

The collectors who purchased works through our international exhibitions have generously agreed to loan them back, recognising their role as custodians of valuable cultural artifacts. This is not just a rediscovery of art but a recognition of justice, honouring an artist whose resolve never faltered despite decades of rejection.

Sam Knight from The New Yorker recently described Henry calling me “a complete mystery” as I worked to bring his art to the world. But the real mystery is the sliding door moment in early 2024 that transformed everything. This is the profound mystery of art itself: how a chance encounter with genius can change not just careers, but souls. Henry Orlik and his incredible work have changed my life forever.

Henry Orlik, c. 1970

“He is the pictorial architect of strange buildings, the inventor of fanciful shapes

on which

he

lavishes a minuteness of colour, with the declared intention of making every square inch a painting in itself. It would not be out of place to call Orlik, a surrealist. He has the poetic aptitude for seeing one form in another.”

– William Gaunt, The Times, 1978

Henry’s quantum method suggests that consciousness actively influences reality through the mechanisms of attention and intention. Each moment you spend with one of his paintings, you become part of the evolution. Orlik has demonstrated that painting can do more than merely depict reality; it can genuinely alter how we perceive and think.

The lost surrealist has been rediscovered, but his revolution is only just beginning. Henry Orlik has provided us with the tools to see things differently. Now, the work of transformation rests with us.

Grant Ford

Curator

All enquiries relating to Henry Orlik’s life, work and reward for finding his lost paintings, should be made to: Winsor Birch, 1 The Parade, Marlborough, Wiltshire, SN8 1NE enquiries@winsorbirch.com +44 (0) 1672 511058

EXHIBITION WORKS

1. Armchair, 1964

Signed and dated lower left: ORLIK 2.4.64

With artist’s stamp lower right

Pencil

34 x 46.5cm.; 13¼ x 18¼in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

At seventeen, Henry Orlik possessed draughtsmanship that could breathe life into domestic objects. This pencil drawing, signed and dated 4th February 1964, demonstrates this technical mastery, revealing an intuitive understanding of how furniture absorbs human presence. The armchair emerges not only as an object of study but also as a silent witness to family rituals, its upholstery rendered with such intimacy that we sense the weight of countless evenings settled into its embrace.

This particular armchair carries significant biographical weight. Its substantial form and ornate decoration suggest the kind of furniture valued by refugee families: pieces symbolising stability after displacement. For the Orlik household, recently settled in Swindon after years in camps, such an armchair would embody hard-won domesticity. The careful detail implies deep familiarity, this chair was part of daily life, perhaps serving as Henry Orlik’s father, Jozef’s, evening refuge after factory shifts, where the Polish war veteran could finally rest in his own domain.

The drawing’s compositional mastery shows remarkable sophistication. The chair occupies pictorial space with regal presence, positioned at a slight angle that suggests both welcome and grandeur. Unlike student exercises that treat furniture as a neutral form, Orlik understands how domestic objects gain personality through use. The subtle asymmetries in cushion compression and the way fabric drapes according to gravitational memory all reflect an artist who discerns life rather than simply replicates appearances.

What elevates this study beyond mere precocity is its psychological sophistication. The chair waits with patient dignity, neither asserting dominance nor blending into background decoration. Its presence suggests the kind of furniture that witnesses family conversations, evening reading, quiet arguments resolved through proximity rather than words. For a displaced family rebuilding domestic life, such objects provided continuity with European traditions whilst adapting to English circumstances.

The date 4th February 1964 positions this work within Britain’s cultural transformation, as traditional values encountered the commercial imagery of Pop Art. Yet Orlik’s approach remained rooted in careful observation and psychological exploration. This seventeen-year-old artist already understood that the most radical artistic statements often emerge through patient engagement with humble subjects rather than the pursuit of fashionable innovation.

Armchair shows how extraordinary vision develops: not through sudden inspiration but through disciplined attention to immediate surroundings. In this modest pencil study, we see the start of a career that would last for decades, proving that artistic greatness often reveals itself quietly, through the simple act of seeing familiar objects with unprecedented clarity.

“…the furniture preserving the memory of loves and hatreds …”

– Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind

2.

Defeat, c. 1970-1972

Mixed Media on Card

79 x 52cm.; 31 x 20½in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

London, Acoris, The Surrealist Art Centre, Henry Orlik, 1972 London, Winsor Birch at the Maas Gallery, Cosmos of Dreams, 9-20 August 2024

“You’re defeated before you’d even started. ... No money, nothing. ... They thought of me as nothing.”

– Henry Orlik

Defeat, was created at the start of Orlik’s artistic career, during a period of profound personal crisis, when he endured poverty and artistic rejection in a London bedsit. The work serves both as exorcism and as a meditation on what Orlik termed life’s fundamental “jeopardy”: existence’s essential precariousness. Combining environmental premonition, spiritual symbolism, and the first glimpses of his revolutionary quantum painting technique, Defeat carries a fresh relevance today, speaking to the fears of contemporary audiences as they grapple with survival and meaning in an age of uncertainty.

“Anything can happen,” Orlik later remarked of this canvas, a phrase weighted with experience. As a young artist just out of Gloucester College of Art, he already felt his dreams threatening to collapse before they had even begun. In the upper right corner, a sleek aeroplane suggests both escape and abandonment; its cruciform silhouette echoes the Orthodox crosses scattered across the surface of the dome, hinting at how spiritual symbolism infiltrates even our most modern, technological imagery. Yet this is not a conventional religious painting. Orlik dismantles institutional authority, presenting spirituality as something to be earned through direct experience rather than inherited tradition.

The painting’s surface vibrates with Orlik’s “excitations”: thousands of minute, spiralled brushstrokes representing the excited state of quantum particles reacting to external stimuli. Even in this early work, painted before his full development of the quantum painting method, his excitations generate a field that vibrates like an overloaded nervous system. As Orlik later explained, each mark embodies qi, a “cosmic spirit that vitalises all things, giving life and growth to nature, movement to water, and energy to man.”

At the centre, a flowering plant painted in luminous magenta embodies both vulnerability and defence. Bristling with thorn-like crosses, it transforms from a simple botanical specimen into a sacred mandala, symbolising consciousness itself: fragile, besieged, yet irreducible. Orlik later remarked, “Christ is in every man, but not everybody is though.” The flower, marked at every edge with the cross, embodies this paradox of universal potential and individual failure.

Defeat can be understood in dialogue with Surrealist precedents. Whereas Max Ernst’s Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924, Museum of Modern Art, New York) depicted innocence under assault, Orlik’s flower asserts defensive power. Where Paul Nash’s Totes Meer (1940–41, Tate, London) translated destruction into a metaphysical seascape, Orlik retained hope within catastrophe. His bloom continues to flower even as disaster looms.

The suspended boulder above the flower intensifies the sense of metaphysical jeopardy. Forever poised yet never descending, it creates an atmosphere of tense anticipation reminiscent of René Magritte’s explorations of suspended time. Unlike Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1929, Lacma, Los Angeles), which questioned the relationship between representation and reality through intellectual puzzles, Orlik’s suspended catastrophe speaks to lived experience: a reminder that we live under constant threat of collapse, yet somehow beauty persists, love continues, creativity flourishes despite rather than because of our security.

Below, the flooded landscape depicts Los Angeles’s Sixth Street Bridge partially submerged, its Gothic Revival arches rising like ribs of a drowned cathedral. Orlik saw such landmarks as fragile anchors, and their partial submersion under water reflects both environmental foreboding and the disorientation experienced by someone living between cultures: where familiar places remain visible, yet somehow out of reach. The hybrid architecture recalls medieval cathedrals, Islamic minarets, and Art Deco towers simultaneously. It is architecture belonging to no single geography or period, but to the fractured vision of the displaced artist. The bridge leads nowhere—as Orlik noted, “not meaningless, but without a destination”, a perfect metaphor for the immigrant condition where movement becomes perpetual without ever achieving arrival. Architectural submersion carries additional resonance compared to other flood paintings in art history. Its flooded landscapes anticipate the rising seas of our own era with a prescience comparable to Turner’s industrial visions. Yet where Théodore Géricault dramatised survival against catastrophe in The Raft of the Medusa (1819, Louvre, Paris), Orlik presents the flood as accomplished fact. The task is not resistance but adaptation: consciousness must learn to endure beneath transformed conditions.

Orlik’s chromatic orchestration operates with extraordinary emotional precision. He composes a symphony of blues, from powder azure to deep cerulean, establishing both atmospheric depth and melancholic tones that would define his later canvases. Against these tonal depths, the warm magentas of the flower blaze with vitality. Unlike Yves Klein’s monochrome explorations in IKB 191 (1962, Private collection), which emphasised aesthetic purity, Orlik’s use of colour carries psychological weight: each hue functions as a tool to transform emotional chaos into harmony, despair into resilience.

Biographically, Defeat proved prophetic. Feeling crushed by rejection, Orlik withdrew from commercial engagement, living reclusively to develop his method in isolation. This trajectory echoes Yves Tanguy’s career, whose later works such as Multiplication of the Arcs (1954, MoMA, New York) achieved similar psychological intensity through isolation, though Tanguy’s forms remained abstractly biomorphic, while Orlik’s maintained connection to recognisable reality.

Within the broader context of 1960s British Art, Defeat occupies unique territory. Unlike Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c. 1944, Tate Britain, London), which depicted human anguish through expressionistic distortion, Orlik’s approach maintained compositional clarity. While Pop artists like David Hockney embraced reproducibility in works such as A Bigger Splash (1967, Tate, London), Orlik turned to quantum physics for metaphors capable of articulating consciousness itself.

Ultimately, Defeat fuses autobiography with universal significance. Its early use of the excitation method reveals Orlik’s ambition to visualise reality as a quantum field of interconnected phenomena. The flower’s persistence amidst jeopardy, the submersion of cultural landmarks, the aeroplane recast as cross: all converge to articulate an enduring truth- that beauty and consciousness endure even in the face of collapse.

Unlike Pop’s immediacy or Conceptual art’s intellectual detachment, Orlik demands sustained attention. His surfaces, like illuminated manuscripts, reward close viewing with endless discovery. In this sense Defeat invites contemplation, linking modern painting with ancient meditative traditions.

As we look, the painting looks back. Its suspended catastrophe mirrors our own condition of perpetual threat, yet also of renewal. The boulder never falls; instead, it becomes the source of possibility. From crisis, Orlik conjured resilience. From jeopardy, he found beauty. From uncertainty, he created a vision of consciousness as indestructible. Defeat, paradoxically, becomes a work of triumph: proof that even in life’s most precarious moments, the creative spirit endures.

3.

Oppressed State, c. 1970-1972

Acrylic on plastic, reverse painting

88.5 x 97.5cm.; 34¾ x 38¼in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited London, Acoris The Surrealist Art Centre, Henry Orlik 1972

Henry Orlik’s Oppressed State presents a prescient vision of systematic control, resonant with present concerns about surveillance, spectacle, and environmental manipulation. Executed in reverse painting on plastic, its very method unsettles perception, foregrounding effects before causes and producing a depth that shifts with every glance.

A fairground helter-skelter, rendered in vivid carnival hues, masquerades as amusement yet operates as distorted version of Jacob’s ladder. Aspiration is reduced to mechanical repetition, spiritual promise is reconfigured as bureaucratic processing. Adjacent left to the helter-skelter, a theatrical stage evokes the spectacle of domination, a cannon-like hybrid of organic strands and mechanical precision exemplifies instruments of control that adapt and evolve. Balloons hover ominously, recalling both defensive wartime measures and latent weapons. Most chilling is the watchtower, ambiguous in function; administrative, residential, or commercial, its surveillance is so seamlessly integrated that it appears ordinary, even reassuring.

The genesis of this vision lies in Orlik’s biography. His Belarusian mother, Lucyna, survived Nazi labour camps, while his Polish father, Jozef, served with Allied forces. These contrasting vantage points of endurance within and resistance without instilled an acute awareness in Orlik of how authority operates both through brute force and through subtle conditioning of environment and psyche. Where Bruegel’s Tower of Babel (1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) revealed the confusion of human ambition thwarted by divine decree; Orlik’s spiral structure speaks instead of bureaucratised aspiration, endlessly recycled. Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione (c. 1749-50, British Museum, London) conveyed oppression through fantastical prisons, yet Orlik’s horror lies in recognisable forms; fairs, stages and towers are repurposed as instruments of control. The bright carnival hues conceal structural entrapment, warm tones offer a veneer of domestic comfort, and cool surveillance blues render authority systematic rather than personal.

Hannah Arendt observed how totalitarianism reduces political action to mechanical response; Orlik’s helter-skelter literalises this insight. Michel Foucault analysed the panopticon’s psychological effects; Orlik extends the concept, envisioning observation naturalised into architecture. Equally, his imagery resonates with Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Borges’s “Lottery in Babylon”, both recognising the tyranny of systems that manipulate hope rather than fear.

Most disturbing perhaps is our complicity; the helter-skelter entices with fun, the tower reassures with safety, the balloons suggest protection. These structures operate precisely because they appeal to human desires for entertainment, security, and efficiency. Orlik foresaw systems in which control emerges less

from imposition than from our own participation. Contemporary digital platforms and urban infrastructures confirm his prescience, where promises of connection or safety mask mechanisms of sorting, processing, and surveillance.

When exhibited at Acoris in 1971 alongside Magritte, Tanguy, and Dalí, Oppressed State announced a Surrealism engaged not only with unconscious perception but also with political manipulation. By visualising how authority infiltrates environment and psyche, Orlik exposed what dominant systems prefer to keep unseen. More than fifty years on, the work endures as both diagnosis and warning. It demonstrates that freedom may erode not through overt violence but through environments engineered to make alternatives inconceivable. In its dazzling colours and sinister ambiguities, Oppressed State renders visible the subtle mechanisms of power, insisting on vigilance where complicity so easily masquerades as choice.

The Lying Plant, c. 1970-1975

Mixed media on card

87 x 60cm.; 34¼ x 23½in.

Provenance

Private Asian Collection

Exhibited

Marlborough, Winsor Birch, Cosmos of Dreams: Part II, 23 August-17 September 2024

“I

was once asked if my technique derived from our awareness of the atom-bomb and disintegration. On the contrary, although the post-war generations are innately aware of the atom-bomb, by treating each shape as if it were a world in itself, I wish to affirm its existence even to the invisible depth of its microscopic agitation of atoms. Not its transience but the strength of its existence.”

– Henry Orlik

Henry Orlik’s The Lying Plant shifts between the graceful elegance of a dancing figure and the terrifying grandeur of a nuclear mushroom cloud. Through his signature “excitations” technique, Orlik captures a central tension between beauty and destruction, truth and deception.

The composition unfolds in three tiers of undulating shapes, painted in soft grey and bruised pastels that evoke both human flesh and the ominous hues of atomic clouds. At the summit, a dark, rounded form tipped with a slender spur suggests at once an elegant jazz-age hat and the stem of a mushroom cloud, capturing the work’s central tension between elegance and impending catastrophe.

The painting’s connection to horror vacui, the fear of empty space, gains significance when examined alongside Orlik’s background. Born in 1947 in post-war Germany to parents who survived war and deportation, he inherited the atomic-era anxiety and displacement of his generation. The dense “excitations” of The Lying Plant read as an existential defence, a refusal to allow emptiness that might hide unspeakable horrors.

The painting’s layered structure and soft greens and pinks recall Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490-1510, Museo del Prado, Madrid), however instead of showing a progression from paradise to damnation, Orlik compresses these into a single continuous moment. The dancer becomes the mushroom cloud, the cloud becomes the dancer. A temporal loop, intensified by the work’s curved 4.

“No man, when in his wits, attains prophetic truth and inspiration, but when he receives the inspired word, either his intelligence is enthralled in sleep or he is demented by some distemper or possession.”

– Plato (c. 300 BC), Timaeus, 71e-72b

forms, which distort space like Einstein’s curved spacetime. Its tripartite structure also echoes M.C. Escher’s Circle Limit IV (1960, Escher Foundation), compressing vast scales into finite space: the planet-shattering mushroom cloud coexists with the domestic scale of the dancer. This scalar tension produces a dizzying effect, mirroring the psychological disorientation of life under nuclear threat.

The title “The Lying Plant” carries multiple meanings beyond its reference to nuclear facilities. “Lying” suggests both falsehood and a horizontal deathlike position, hinting at the deceptions surrounding early atomic testing. The successful Trinity test enabled the U.S. military to deploy the atomic bomb, marking the start of the Atomic Age. Meanwhile, the word “plant” suggests organic growth, transforming the mushroom cloud into a perverse deadly bloom. The dancer becomes a celebration of this corruption, a danse macabre at the edge of apocalypse.

The work’s connection to Surrealism addresses deeper questions about the nature of reality. In 1974, Orlik’s paintings were shown alongside René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, and Salvador Dali in Surrealist Masters. Like Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1928-29, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), which declares “This is not a pipe,” Orlik’s painting blurs representation and reality: the figure is both present and absent, the mushroom cloud both real and imagined. This ontological uncertainty mirrors the epistemological crisis of the atomic age, when matter itself revealed a stranger, more dangerous nature than ever before.

For Orlik, this painting represents his confrontation with early historical trauma. His father fought for the Allied Forces, while his mother survived a Nazi labour camp. Their displacement to England and life in refugee camps exposed him to how political forces can reshape lives. The Lying Plant turns this personal history into a statement about the hidden persistence of threat beneath apparent beauty.

In an era of climate crisis, pandemic, and nuclear tension, Orlik’s vision of beauty intertwined with destruction feels prophetic. The dancer endlessly transforms into the mushroom cloud, reminding us that humanity’s shift in consciousness from the atomic age is unfinished, we continue to celebrate technologies that could bring our own destruction.

The Lying Plant reflects the inherent ambiguity of human progress. Scientific discoveries that enabled nuclear weapons also brought benefits, just as artistic techniques can inspire both beauty and terror. Within Orlik’s wider oeuvre, it fuses personal history with universal themes. His withdrawal from commercial art reflects a refusal to compromise messages of urgency. In today’s world of global uncertainty, Orlik’s dancing nightmare feels both necessary and profoundly beautiful.

5.

Study for Antichrist – Female, c. 1971-1973

Pencil and watercolour

With artist’s stamp lower right 41 x 68cm.; 16¼ x 26¾in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

Marlborough, Winsor Birch, Cosmos of Dreams: Part II, 23 August – 7 September 2024

“Surely some revelation is at hand …”

– William Butler Yeats,

‘The

Second Coming’

The Sacred Feminine and Creative Genesis: Henry Orlik’s Antichrist and the Annunciation of Grace

Henry Orlik’s 1973 masterwork Antichrist, considered alongside its two preparatory studies, constitutes a profound meditation on sacred femininity in 20th-century art. Instead of depicting opposition to divine creation, Orlik’s composition offers an alternative interpretation: “Annachrist,” the annunciation of grace through feminine creative agency. These works, created during Orlik’s exhibition period alongside significant paintings by Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, showcase his distinctive synthesis of quantum physics, Eastern philosophy, and Christian mysticism into a revolutionary visual theology.

Orlik’s signature “excitations” technique, involving thousands of meticulous brushstrokes inspired by quantum physics, produces compositions that vibrate with atomic-level energy. In his 1985 theoretical statement, he explicitly connected this method to Chinese philosophy, describing qi as “life’s motion, animation. A cosmic spirit that vitalises all things and gives life and growth to nature, movement to water and energy to man.” This Eastern framework transforms the flowing hair in Antichrist into a visualisation of universal creative force. His concept of “brush motion” as “the abstract emotional key to the concrete quintessential forms” explains how these marks serve both formal and spiritual purposes. The “living line”, described as expressing “emotion and impulse”, becomes a visible expression of creative energy itself. Orlik’s method represents “a synthesis of the concrete and the abstract” in which the artist must “fill himself with that energy, so that in a moment of inspiration he may become the vehicle for its expression.”

6.

Study for Antichrist – Male, c. 1971-1973

Pencil and watercolour

With artist’s stamp lower right 35 x 84; 13¾ x 33½in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

Marlborough, Winsor Birch, Cosmos of Dreams: Part II, 23 August – 17 September 2024

“… somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs ...”

– William Butler Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’

The initial preparatory drawing shows the female figure in a state of sovereign autonomy. Reclining in a classical, but open-legged, pose, she commands rather than submits; her pregnancy-implied fullness signifies her role as creator. While evoking Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814, Louvre), Orlik’s composition completely reverses the traditional power dynamic. Where Ingres portrays the female as an exotic object for masculine consumption, Orlik’s figure embodies the creative process itself. The hair appears as an independent force, a dark river of energy flowing across the composition with its own vitality. This anatomical detail, qi made visible, presents the feminine principle guiding creative processes.

The second study depicts the male figure in a state of complete vulnerability, crawling on hands and knees in reverent and eager anticipation. His muscular form highlights both strength and surrender, implying that masculine power finds its true purpose only in service to the greater creative force embodied by the feminine. The partial view of flowing hair creates the visual link that will unite these figures in the final work.

In the finished painting, the hair that initially appeared as an independent element now acts as a literal bridge between the figures. Set against rolling hills rendered in Orlik’s distinctive palette, the dark form above, extending from the female figure’s hair, dominates the scene like a benevolent storm bringing lifegiving rain. This creates a visual echo between the macrocosm and microcosm: the creative act mirrors cosmic forces of creation. The composition combines the individual studies into a unified statement. The female figure maintains her commanding stance, while the male figure, still approaching, is clearly drawn forward by the compelling force of her hair. Through this connection, she literally pulls him into creative participation while embodying the spiritual force that draws all masculine energy towards its generative purpose.

The title Antichrist initially implies opposition or false divinity, yet Orlik’s composition offers a very different theological perspective. The alternative reading “Annachrist” holds deep significance: “Anna” means “grace” in Christian tradition, and Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, signifies the feminine lineage through which divine incarnation becomes possible. This interpretation shifts the composition from potential blasphemy to a profound theological statement. The female figure becomes not a temptress but an announcer of grace; her hair, stretching across the landscape, becomes a visible symbol of divine feminine agency. The male figure’s willing approach suggests recognition of this authority; he is called to his proper role as a participant rather than an instigator of divine creation. This reading aligns with contemporary feminist theology, which aims to reclaim the divine feminine as central to creation narratives. Orlik’s visual theology suggests that traditional patriarchal interpretations have misinterpreted the essential nature of the creative force, confusing effect for cause and participant for director.

“People seem to cling together for comfort and protection.”

– Henry Orlik, 1972

Recently uncovered biographical documents reveal the traumatic experiences that shaped both the artist and his work. Orlik’s mother, Lucyna, survived Nazi forced labour in Belarus; his father, Jozef, endured harsh treatment before serving with Allied forces. Their meeting at a “moated castle” near Ankum, where Henry was born, transforms his origins into a mythic story of creation emerging from destruction. The family’s displacement through Polish resettlement camps established themes of renewal and resilience. Most notably, Lucyna’s steadfast presence throughout Orlik’s career, advocating for his educational choices and sending money and encouragement during difficult years in New York, embodies the nurturing creative wisdom depicted in Antichrist.

Orlik’s lifelong pursuit to “understand the world and himself through his art,” coupled with his statement that “the paintings taught me, and I was there to learn,” frames artistic creation as a receptive spiritual journey. This biographical context shifts the flowing hair from an erotic symbol to a representation of invisible connections that support creative life across distance and challenge. Orlik’s integration of scientific and spiritual understanding forecasts contemporary shifts towards holistic inquiry. The quantum-inspired technique anticipates artists like Wolfgang Tillmans, whose photographs explore core questions about matter and energy, and Anselm Kiefer’s use of material substances and mythological references. However, where Kiefer’s focus remains mainly masculine and Germanic, Orlik prioritises feminine creative agency. His 1985 statement reveals that each spiral mark signifies meditation on atomic excitation states, the fundamental energy conditions enabling all dynamic processes. This grounding in quantum physics transforms mark-making into a visualisation of creative principles operating at every scale from atomic to cosmic.

His description of treating “each shape as if it were a world in itself” to “affirm its existence even to the invisible depth of its microscopic agitation of atoms” suggests that artistic creation engages with the same forces governing physical reality. The technique’s “sensitivity of a lie-detector”, requiring genuine emotional states, validates the work’s deep personal significance.

The tragic loss of Orlik’s later works following the seizure of his London flat makes surviving pieces like Antichrist particularly precious as testimonies to his revolutionary vision. His claim that “you cannot fully understand my art without those paintings” invests these works with greater significance. The Antichrist anticipates many contemporary issues, including ecological awareness, feminist spirituality, and interdisciplinary approaches to creativity. The work’s exploration of gender dynamics offers profound insights into collaborative creativity, honouring both feminine and masculine contributions while acknowledging the primacy of feminine contributions in creative origin.

Henry Orlik’s Antichrist offers a revolutionary reimagining of creation stories, emerging from experiences of destruction and renewal. The work’s key insight, that feminine energy leads rather than simply serves masculine creative power, reflects the artist’s experience of maternal support, allowing genuine expression against patriarchal dominance. The “Annachrist” interpretation becomes a recognition of the work’s theological message: grace appears through creative survival, through love’s persistence despite systematic attempts at annihilation, and through maternal wisdom preserving life force across generations of trauma. Orlik’s blend of quantum physics, Eastern philosophy, and personal experience creates an artistic language that addresses modern concerns about holistic creativity.

In the flowing hair connecting his figures, Orlik visualises the fundamental force drawing all reality into a creative relationship despite attempts at separation. Art enthusiast Gerald Dowden’s 1978 encounter with Orlik’s work offers invaluable contemporary testimony. His immediate recognition of hair’s significance in Orlik’s iconic The Parting, describing “convoluted tresses of faded gold” and “meticulous, calligraphic care”, validates our interpretation of hair as a creative force. This is not the Antichrist of destruction but the Annachrist of generation, the divine feminine announcement that creation continues, love persists, and new life emerges from ruins. His work offers both inspiration and guidance for understanding creativity as a form of resistance, healing, and hope in an era grappling with collective trauma and spiritual disconnection.

7.

Eggs Unhatched on the Sun, c. 1970-1975

With artist’s stamp lower left Coloured crayon

78.5 x 147.5cm.; 31 x 58in.

Provenance

Museum & Art Swindon

Eggs Unhatched on the Sun is a meditation on potentiality, time, and cosmic order, staged through a visual paradox that unsettles the viewer’s sense of reality. At its heart lies a philosophical question: can creation exist where fulfilment is impossible? Orlik deploys the modest medium of coloured crayon to render an image that belongs firmly within the surrealist discourse yet retains a distinctive philosophical tenor.

In the foreground, an undulating terrain of terracotta depressions gently cradles ovoid forms. These cavities resemble both womb and tomb, symbols of creation and burial, protection and confinement. The eggs, painted in shades from ivory to blue-grey-green, suggest fragile embryos poised between possibility and impossibility. Above, a radiant golden disc presides: the sun, giver and destroyer of life, its brilliance necessary for growth yet lethal to embryonic fragility. This contrast between the earthy tones below and the ethereal upper expanse enacts the ancient divide between terrestrial and celestial realms.

Though the work announces Eggs Unhatched, some eggs appear already fractured, confounding chronology and perception. Like Dalí’s explorations of temporal fluidity, Orlik here dramatises the instability of fact and appearance. The rhythmic repetition of the egg-bearing hollows recalls Max Ernst’s Forest and Dove (1927, Tate, London), where endless vertical forms create hypnotic rhythm and existential unease, yet, whereas Ernst’s vertical repetitions yearned towards ascendence, Orlik’s horizontal expanse suggests infinite regress. The viewer becomes both witness and participant in a cosmic process that refuses completion.

Orlik’s debt to Magritte is clear in his play between title and image, exposing the gap between language and reality. The influence of Leonor Fini is likewise present in the liminal tension between life and death, transformation and suspension. Fini’s art often explored metamorphosis and dissolved boundaries, and Orlik echoes this in his fractured eggs, forms poised between becoming and dissolution. The eggs, never fully realised yet never nullified, embody a perpetual present, heavy with expectation.

Philosophical resonance runs throughout. Aristotle’s distinction between potential and actual being is translated into fragile embryonic shells; the Chinese concept of qi, vital energy coursing between earth and sky feels palpable in the shimmering interplay of tones. Mythic resonances also surface: the cosmic egg of Orphic and Hindu traditions is evoked yet subverted, its destiny thwarted beneath the hostile sun. The work reflects on genesis denied, creation foreclosed by cosmic circumstance.

The materiality of crayon is crucial. Its waxy surface seems to generate light from within, as though the eggs themselves emit the energy of their possible transformation. This surface quality aligns with surrealist interests in chance and automatism, though Orlik’s careful structure suggests deliberate orchestration.

His undulating landscape recalls Yves Tanguy’s dreamlike terrains, yet retains an optimism absent from Tanguy’s desolate visions: despite their predicament, the eggs radiate a latent energy, as if change hovers just beyond reach.

Orlik also engages with scientific consciousness. By the mid-twentieth century, radiation was understood as both nourishing and destructive; the eggs thus exist in a quantum state, simultaneously viable and doomed until observation collapses their possibilities. This scientific paradox dovetails with the philosophical one at the heart of the work.

Eggs Unhatched on the Sun resists resolution. Instead, it presents a visual koan: creation arrested, possibility thwarted yet never extinguished. Its lasting force lies in its refusal to close meaning, compelling viewers instead to dwell upon the paradox of life poised eternally between becoming and non-being. Orlik transforms the familiar into the strange, opening a field of contemplative wonder that ensures the work’s enduring power within twentieth-century surrealism.

8.

Wind (Lovers Entwined), c. 1970-1972

With artist’s stamp lower right

Pencil

59 x 42.5cm.; 23¼ x 16¾in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited London, Winsor Birch at the Maas Gallery, Cosmos of Dreams, 9-20 August 2024

Henry Orlik’s drawing Wind (Lovers Entwined) presents three female figures entwined with exquisite tenderness, their forms rendered through precise draughtsmanship, yet their faces veiled by cascading hair. This concealment transforms what might otherwise appear a traditional nude study into an exploration of psychological complexity: intimacy is shown, yet identity withheld. Vulnerability and strength coexist.

Their flowing hair functions both as ornament and defence unlike the classical drapery of antiquity or the decorative veils of Ingres, Orlik deploys concealment strategically. These women remain visible enough to affirm beauty and dignity, yet anonymous enough to resist objectification. The motif resonates with the experience of displaced communities, where survival often required being simultaneously present and invisible.

Orlik’s mother Lucyna survived Nazi labour camps before negotiating refugee life in Britain, where selective visibility was a means of survival. Within the drawing, the central figure echoes this maternal wisdom. Her body serves as an axis around which the others find protection, her posture bearing the weight of responsibility, her obscured face preserving psychological autonomy.

The work gains further resonance when set beside Egon Schiele’s Two Women Embracing (1915, Albertina, Vienna). Both artists examine female intimacy through line, yet their purposes diverge. Schiele’s Expressionist distortion externalises crisis and vulnerability; Orlik retains classical proportion, using concealment not as exposure but as a shield. Where Schiele’s women embody individual turmoil, Orlik’s figures embody solidarity and collective survival.

Equally striking is Orlik’s treatment of atmosphere, using confident graphite shading transforming space into a tangible force that creates pressure that renders the women’s defensive configurations physically necessary. This anticipates later developments in environmental art, marking a departure from the academic isolation of figures on neutral grounds still prevalent in Britain at the time.

In the cultural landscape of 1970–71, this emphasis on feminine solidarity carried particular significance. While feminist discourse was beginning to reshape artistic thought, most visual representations continued to isolate women as singular subjects. Against the backdrop of Pop Art’s consumerist imagery and Minimalism’s industrial forms, Orlik’s insistence on intimate, human connections were both radical and humane.

“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”

– Carl Jung (1875-1961)

Bodies are disclosed but faces remain veiled; individual identity recedes even as nurturing presence is celebrated. A subtle balance of revelation and concealment is achieved. These figures function as archetypes of care and endurance while retaining the right to remain unknowable. In doing so, Orlik highlights the invisible emotional labour historically performed by women, especially within displaced families, where maternal strength often sustains collective survival at the cost of personal recognition.

This intimacy demands reciprocal respect from viewers. The drawing is not monumental but private, requiring close engagement. Like the concealed figures themselves, it invites trust while enforcing boundaries. Such themes of concealment and revelation, as well as highlighting the external pressures that shape intimate bonds would later shape Orlik’s career.

The contemporary relevance of Wind (Lovers Entwined) is still striking in today’s climate of digital surveillance and enforced visibility. Orlik’s recognition that genuine connection sometimes depends on strategic concealment remains profoundly resonant. The figures’ cascading hair is ultimately more than modesty. It is instead a sanctuary within exposure, affirming that intimacy requires both openness and protected distance. Through this early work, Orlik demonstrates an enduring truth: that the deepest respect for others involves celebrating what is revealed while honouring what must remain hidden.

9.

Win or Lose, c. 1975-1978

With artist’s stamp verso

Acrylic on canvas

101.5 x 76cm.; 40 x 30in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited London, Winsor Birch at the Maas Gallery, Cosmos of Dreams, 9-20 August 2024

Having exhibited in Acoris’s Surrealist Masters alongside Dalí and Magritte in 1973 and 1974, Orlik went on to paint Win or Lose. The painting unfolds as a theatre of chance. On the right, a colossal stack of playing cards rises like a ziggurat, monumentalising risk itself. These are no longer recreational objects but cosmic dice, recalling Tarot towers as symbols of sudden change and divine intervention. The title, Win or Lose, affirms life’s fundamental condition as a wager in which uncertainty is the only certainty.

At the centre, a rose-hued arch is evocative of Pompeian fresco and Islamic ornament and frames a grotto where blue-green waters gather with heartshaped petals drifting above. This impossible flow recalls Escher’s paradoxes, yet where Escher pursued mathematical puzzles, Orlik attains emotional ascendance. The petals trace trajectories of negative curvature, anticipating hyperbolic geometry. Love itself appears to generate its own gravitational field, bending reality around centres of emotion rather than mass.

Above, palm-like forms emerge as crossed architectural columns, bound by Orlik’s signature “hair”, presenting delicate filaments akin to neural pathways. These fabricated palms recall Roman emblems of triumph and the Christian cross, yet here they are reconstituted as infrastructure. Triumph is not awarded by fortune but constructed deliberately, a cultural response to existential uncertainty.

To the right, a lattice interrupts the surface, recalling Mondrian’s grids and Le Corbusier’s Modulor, yet its function is enigmatic: an attempt to measure the unmeasurable. Above, chimneys crown a monumental building. Their verticality contrasts with the composition’s horizontal drift, conjuring both domestic shelter and industrial memory. In the 1970s, such imagery resonated strongly, balancing the security of post-war reconstruction with an emerging awareness of environmental cost.

Every inch of the canvas pulses with Orlik’s horror vacui. Unlike the medieval dread of emptiness, his mark-making stems from a quantum conviction that space is not void but energy in excitation. Orlik uses such excitations to create luminous yet muted tones in what he called “chromatic vibrations.” His writings describe human “optical awareness of the chromatic vibrations of sources of light,” and here colour behaves as energy rather than ornament. Blues breathe with microscopic intensity; rose and yellow imbue architecture with warmth; petals glow as if lit from within by emotional charge. The twilight tonality captures a liminal hour, when rational outlines dissolve into possibility.

The playing cards convert the scene into a cosmic casino where stakes exceed material gain: can consciousness actively shape reality, or is it bound to react to circumstance? The petals embody love as paradox: connection entails loss, intimacy trades independence, meaning sacrifices certainty. Yet Orlik shows that such wagers generate their own physics, suspending conventional rules within zones of heightened commitment. The fabricated palms extend this vision, representing culture’s effort to build triumph from fragile material, asserting that meaning must be constructed rather than received. Since the binary of winning and losing is inescapable, wisdom lies in choosing contests wisely and fashioning frameworks that sustain future victories even when present battles are lost.

The painting explores the paradox of modern consciousness: how unstable forces become the foundation stones of meaning, and how the growing capacity to measure the world coexists with awareness that essential experiences resist calculation. The grid, both blueprint and trap, symbolises this tension, a visual recognition that even the most advanced systems remain crude approximations of lived complexity.

The central arch evokes sanctuaries across traditions; the palms combine crucifixion and triumph; chimneys rise like secular incense. Orlik secularises sacred forms without draining their spiritual force, suggesting that transcendence arises not from doctrine but from engagement with uncertainty.

Born in Germany to a Belarusian mother conscripted into labour and a Polish father who served with the Allies, Orlik grew up acutely aware of identity as contingent and unstable. The cards evoke the refugee experience, where bureaucratic decisions determined fates across generations. The chimneys symbolise both promise and alienation for post-war immigrants, embodying prosperity tempered by estrangement from tradition. His filaments of hair stand for the fragile networks, letters, remittances, and memories that held dispersed communities together.

The painting situates itself between Piranesi’s impossible prisons, Klee’s architectural fantasies, and Bosch’s moral theatres. Yet where Piranesi conveys confinement, Orlik finds liberation through uncertainty; where Klee adopted playful primitivism, Orlik imagines consciousness as constructive force; where Bosch moralised, Orlik proposes collaboration with chance on quantum terms. The monumental cards also anticipate shifts within the art world itself, foretelling a system increasingly governed by speculation, closer to casino logic than aesthetic judgment. Against this volatility, the floating petals suggest an alternative physics: that genuine emotion and craft can defy market gravity, sustaining meaning through patience and care.

Through cards, grid, petals, chimneys, and palms, Orlik makes visible that every decision, relationship, and creative act is a wager. Its radical insight is not to escape the game but to inhabit it creatively. The cards stand as monuments to uncertainty; the petals demonstrate that love alters physics; the grid records the effort to measure impossibility; the chimneys exhale the persistence of ordinary striving; the palms transform triumph into infrastructure. Each spiralling mark is a victory over entropy, an architecture of resilience.

In an era of algorithmic prediction, Orlik’s vision is freshly urgent. Probability may structure scientific knowledge, yet human meaning persists beyond calculation. Win or Lose offers an ethic of creative wager, insisting that consciousness remains the true architect of significance.

10.

Change: Celtic Symbol, c. 1975-80

Mixed media on card

67 x 82cm.; 26¼ x 32¼in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

Marlborough, Winsor Birch, Cosmos of Dreams: Part II, 23 August – 17 September 2024

Change: Celtic Symbol is a study of the futility of territorial conflict, exposing the fragility of boundaries that attempt to divide peoples bound by shared heritage. The work transforms the ancient Wessex landscape into a mythological stage where illusionary lines on maps confront deeper evolutionary and cultural continuities.

The Orlik family’s resettlement in Wiltshire placed the artist in direct contact with the prehistoric landscapes of Stonehenge and Avebury. These formative encounters, alongside repeated journeys through the Wessex countryside, endowed him with a vision of landscape as palimpsest: both everyday terrain and archaeological revelation.

At the centre of Change: Celtic Symbol lies a wall that embodies the universal concept of division. Constructed from arches, steps, and geometric forms, it does not represent a specific fortification but rather the symbolic and anthropological impulse to create separation. Orlik described it as “a language written in a language that neither would ever understand,” an enigmatic script that obscures communication while purporting to enable it. Meandering across the canvas like a river, the wall emphasises arbitrariness; low in height, it is less a defensive obstacle than a ritual marker of “divisive division.”

Two female figures dominate the scene, positioned in mirrored stances across this barrier. Their resemblance undermines the rationale for conflict, revealing confrontation as projection rather than necessity. Their raised curved weapons, resembling both tusks and antler-tools, connect present antagonism with prehistoric traditions, recalling the excavation implements used to shape earthworks at Avebury. The struggle thus becomes not only territorial but cosmological: over who claims the right to shape the land itself.

Beneath them unfolds a “living landscape,” its undulating green terrain recalling burial mounds and organic forms. Orlik discerned, within these rhythms, a reclining female figure, suggesting the earth’s embodiment as both witness and participant in human history. This imagery resonates with the Celtic Cailleach, the divine hag who shapes mountains and valleys, reminding us that human conflict remains transient upon the enduring body of the land. Colour too, reinforces the symbolic charge. Greens, signifying in Celtic tradition the otherworld, situate the scene within liminal space, while russet tones recall ancient weapons and organic decay. The spectral flesh of the figures appears almost as emanations of the land itself.

Change: Celtic Symbol, embodying Orlik’s lifelong pursuit of unity between myth, science, and history, preserves cultural memory while offering prophetic insight into nationalism, migration, and identity. The figures remain locked in mirrored opposition; the wall meanders through their world; the green mounds pulse with accumulated life. Yet beneath these divisions lies a deeper recognition: enemies often share the closest kinship, and the boundaries we defend may prove less enduring than the connections they deny.

“Imagine a fairy chain stretched from mountain peak to mountain peak, as far as the eye could reach, and paid out until it touched the “high places” of the earth at a number of ridges, banks, and knowls.”

–

Alfred Watkins, The Old Straight Track

Lost and Remembered, c. 1972

With artist’s stamp verso

Acrylic on canvas

74 x 109cm.; 29 x 43.5in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Henry Orlik painted Lost and Remembered in 1972 during his five-week-stay in Warsaw as part of an extended visit to Poland when he fully explored the country. He found an apartment in the district which housed the embassies and recalls “living like a king”, quaffing Russian champagne and wandering through the city. He remembers the strangeness of the newly rebuilt centre after the war, which felt “not quite real”, like a film set juxtaposed with buildings that were still pockmarked with bullet holes.

Dominating Lost and Remembered, a coral-pink, shell-like form, its spiral cavity evoking the mathematical precision of organic growth, rises onto its “knees”, inching forward. Orlik describes it as a “very feminine” shape. Vagina-like, its form appears both as an amphitheatre and sanctuary, recalling natural formations: caves, shells, water-carved stones that seem intentional yet are entirely the result of elemental forces. It is both enticing and threatening and we encounter a world where the earth reveals its creative essence through timeless forms replicated in multiple manifestations.

The cavernous shell looms towards a small, luminous pearl-like sphere, sandy in texture yet radiant, as though distilled from geological time. It embodies transformation: sand, water, and pressure crystallised into precious form. A small, unformed fleshy creature, maybe sperm or phallus, inches towards the cavern and reinforces the temporal scale. With patient determination, it embodies rhythms beyond human urgency, echoing John Keats’s insight in Ode to a Nightingale (1819): that true understanding requires surrender to natural time. Its movement is as easy and instinctive as a child chasing a ball. Here, reverence is not imposed by doctrine but expressed by nature itself, the creature is compelled towards the round sphere and approaches its beauty with instinctive care, unaware of the lurking red cavern. The juxtaposition of the flesh-creature, sphere, and monumental spiral establishes a poetic dialogue between scales, microscopic life and geological vastness that are united by patterns of growth and transformation.

Out of this landscape to the left, human bodies intertwine and elongate, appear and dissolve, creating a ring of infinite creation. Orlik’s vibrating brushwork animates these organic, morphous forms that ripple with subtle energy as if being absorbed into matter. The motif recalls Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where human bodies transmute into natural features, or Joan Miró’s The Birth of the World (1925, Museum of Modern Art, New York), where elemental chaos erupts into being. Yet Orlik’s tone is gentler, suggesting alluring absorption rather than violence: humanity here becomes part of the landscape’s memory rather than its master.

Lost and Remembered carries more than one truth and within his erotic landscape imagery Orlik plays with concepts of loss of innocence, involuntary encounters, unsolicited desire and enticement, the terror of childhood, of loss and love, the creative or generative urge despite external dangers, the breaking 11.

“All is flux, nothing stays still.”

– Heraclitus

up of community or family. He discloses, what Blake would call, ‘contraries’, such that destruction leads to creation, for if the small figure reveals itself as an unformed phallus or sperm chasing the enticing pearl/egg into the vagina/ cavern, it destroys the homogeny and safety of the ring of warm bodies but thus provokes a different creation within the red chamber. Similarly, the encounter may be viewed as loss of innocence at the hands of experience: the small unformed creature naively chases its ball in a childhood game, lured into the enticing mouth of the experienced, waiting red creature, and it becomes its prey. A figure behind it, cowers and turns away, knowing but unwilling to witness the devastating, life-altering encounter.

In the sky, an umbrella-shaped, multi-faceted star or rent in the atmosphere connects to the centre of the ring of figures by a delicate, thin antenna or aerial. The human figures lie in the green shadow of this portal/star, as if it is integral to them but as Orlik states, “it has a drive of its own.” Its form resembles a tendril or climbing plant and seems to symbolise the earth’s own communicative capacity: a reaching gesture beyond its immediate boundaries suggesting a planetary connection beyond the authority of humans who shelter in its shadow.

The coral-pink of the shell-like form radiates warmth and vitality, set against supporting greens of growth, sandy golds of sediment, and muted blues of water and air. These are the colours of the planet itself; stone, vegetation, sea, and sky, presented in their essential state, beyond interpretation or possession. Spatially the work departs from naturalistic perspective. Forms inhabit a realm governed by psychological and spiritual logic, where relationships express meaning rather than optical realism. In this sense, the title Lost and Remembered becomes clear. It does not refer to individual memory but to the earth’s own remembrance: the shell embodying spiral growth, the pearl recording transformation under pressure, the antenna symbolising universal connectivity. Orlik presents the landscape as an archive of enduring patterns.

The resonance of this vision is acute in an era of ecological crisis. Unlike apocalyptic visions of desolation, Lost and Remembered affirms resilience. Robinson Jeffers, in The Answer (1937), urged “falling in love outward” with nature beyond human concerns. Orlik anticipates such thinking, positioning beauty not as a human imposition but as a property of the earth itself. His work parallels aspects of Land Art, Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemeral sculptures, for example, which highlight natural processes with minimal intervention. Yet while Goldsworthy foregrounds temporality, Orlik presents a timeless cosmos where creativity is constant. The painting is set within a curved landscape: the curvature of the Earth itself. This indicates the universality of the depiction which is not particular to any one person or even species but can have both microscopic focus – to the smallest atom – and macroscopic. It, thus, reveals the universality of the process of creation and that desire (as creative urge) is a concept that is found in the smallest quantum and replicated in all aspects of the universe. It is unavoidable, inevitable and all-encompassing. Orlik’s vision affirms the earth’s innate, enticing, creativity rather than its destructive indifference.

Born in post-war Germany to Polish and Belarusian parents displaced by conflict, Orlik understood loss and impermanence intimately. For him, the world’s fundamental patterns seen in the spiral, the pearl, the small creature, offered consolation: beauty more enduring than the social and political upheavals that defined his childhood. In this sense, the work meditates on survival: what remains when nations dissolve, when empires fall, when memory itself falters.

Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native (1878) and Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2007) both suggest that imagining life without humanity sharpens our perception of what truly matters. Similarly, Albert Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada, California (1868, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.) dwarfs human figures against vast landscapes, though Orlik’s vision feels more intimate, attending to the earth’s inner mechanisms rather than its grandeur. Where Bierstadt emphasises scale, Orlik attends to process, the transformations that continually generate beauty.

Orlik painted two version of Lost and Remembered. This is the second, larger version in which he added, on the right edge, a curved, sharp structure with angular sharp, cutting, plains. It blurs boundaries between geological formation and cultural ruin, and its cutting edges expose the fragile susceptibility of the naked organic forms. The hidden construction lends an additional, lurking threat. Orlik states: “that’s life, you’re always in danger” and here poses the ambiguity between what is natural and what is man-made threat. It is non-biological and menacing, cold and machine-like, destructive and inhumane and diametrically opposed to the distant star/portal, its harsh outline appears as an oppositional threat to the cosmic, but remote shape. Its mechanised quality emphasises the vulnerability of the soft, fleshy ring of figures and offers the idea of the destructive indifference of unasked for existence which is at the whim of forces beyond the control of the human.

Lost and Remembered functions both as elegy and celebration, mourning what human activity has disrupted while affirming nature’s inexhaustible creativity. Every form in the painting from the spiral cavity, the luminous pearl, the innocent creature, the dissolving torsos, the machine-like ruins, participates in a wider meditation on memory and endurance. Consciousness itself, Orlik suggests, may be nothing more than the earth’s way of momentarily recognising its own magnificence.

12.

Surrealist Still Life, c. 1970

Watercolour

51 x 68.5cm.; 20.1 x 27in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

“I’m always searching for my inner self. But I don’t know if I’m successful. You never understand the creative process.”

– Henry Orlik

In Henry Orlik’s Surrealist Still Life, what starts as a familiar scene of household objects transforms into a disturbing stage where ordinary items assume the roles of characters in an enigmatic story. This watercolour marks a pivotal moment in Orlik’s development, when his innovative visual language began forming the systematic study of consciousness that would define his mature work.

The crimson tablecloth commands attention not only as a support but as a theatrical platform. This is no burgundy dining room; rather, it is the intense scarlet of ceremony, transforming every object that rests upon its surface. The colour acts as an alchemical agent, giving familiar forms new significance and establishing the work’s premise: that consciousness is a transformative field in which meaning shifts with the focus of attention.

On the left, a pink anthropomorphic figure poses with deliberate sensuality. Adorned with flowing azure ribbons, this puppet-like form is simultaneously vulnerable and self-assured, theatrical yet intimate. Its confident stance suggests privileged knowledge, while the ribbons link disparate elements, unifying scattered objects into psychological coherence and illustrating Orlik’s view that consciousness operates through connection, not isolation.

The dark coral-coloured horns rising from the centre defy categorisation, evoking musical instrument, organic growth, threats, and sculptural form. Their warm hue resonates with the tablecloth while asserting a distinct identity, functioning as a conductor’s baton orchestrating the surrounding ensemble. Positioned between the sensual figure and symbolic elements, the horns bridge disparate realms, reflecting Orlik’s capacity to translate incompatible languages of meaning.

The anthropomorphic chicken, cradled in a gleaming silver dish, signifies Orlik’s most daring transformation. By blurring the boundary between living creature and culinary object, the work intentionally generates discomfort. Surrealism

here arises not from visual trickery, but through close attention to unsettling truths of everyday life. Its presentation suggests offering and sacrifice, feast and funeral, compelling viewers to confront the ethics of consumption.

Orlik’s most symbolically dense passage occupies the right margin, where a botanically precise crown of thorns introduces Christian iconography into dialogue with secular imagery. Enigmatically, a miniature whale’s tail creates oceanic vastness in an intimate domestic space. This evocative detail: earth’s largest creatures depicted as the composition’s smallest element, transforms the table into an oceanic depth, suggesting that consciousness navigates fluid territories where familiar landmarks lose conventional meaning. More explicitly, Orlik colludes with Caravaggio’s still life at the front of his painting Supper at Emmaus (1601, National Gallery, London) which has incongruous fish-tail shadow, signifying the revelation of Christ’s attendance at the meal. In Orlik’s painting, he transforms Caravaggio’s Christ to shamanic antlers, his chicken on its platter, and his basket becomes a crown of thorns. Whilst Caravaggio’s still life teeters on the edge of the table, Orlik’s gets up and dances. High-kicking cherries suggest temptation and sweetness, while a serpent emerges from the assemblage, animating the composition through archetypal resonance.

Orlik’s watercolour technique captures content with exceptional precision. Its transparency enables colours to interact through layers, producing atmospheric effects that reflect the fluid boundary between conscious and unconscious experience. While echoing Edward Burra’s theatrical watercolours of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in muted yet vibrant colour harmonies, Orlik focuses on interior landscapes, using the medium’s unpredictability to access psychological domains beyond rational understanding.

The puppet figure’s theatrical pose implies selfhood as performative, while the transformed chicken challenges perceptions of subjectivity. These explorations resonate for an artist shaped by mid-twentieth-century European displacements, inheriting a nuanced sense that identity must remain adaptable. Created in the mid-1970s, as Orlik established his reputation in London following his breakthrough exhibitions at the Acoris Surrealist Art Centre, the work fuses surrealist principles with personal vision, inviting close viewing and fostering a conspiratorial relationship with the image.

The subtle erotic undertones engage surrealism’s exploration of desire, yet Orlik retains restraint, preventing symbolism from becoming literal. Surrealist Still Life explores consciousness under pressure, synthesising domestic familiarity with psychological strangeness to raise questions about identity, desire, and meaning. The work refuses resolution, instead inviting engagement with mystery and showing that familiar reality holds infinite possibilities. Through careful orchestration of transformed objects on their scarlet stage, Orlik creates genuine mystery that enriches understanding and demonstrates consciousness retains capacity for surprise despite attempts at prediction and control.

“My painting is visible images which conceal nothing,” he wrote, “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)

13.

Escape, c. 1970-1975

Mixed media on card

87 x 60cm.; 34¼ x 23½in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

Marlborough, Winsor Birch, Cosmos of Dreams: Part II, 23 August – 17 September 2024

Henry Orlik’s Escape was created during the artist’s most celebrated period, and it showcases his refined ‘excitations’ technique: thousands of microscopic, spiralled brushstrokes that animate the surface with ‘molecular energy’. The painting depicts the creative spirit’s flight from institutional constraints toward an authentic vision.

The composition depicts a radiant yet empty world. The absence of human figures signals a state of consciousness unmediated by social expectation, recalling Giorgio de Chirico’s The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (1910, private collection).

However Orlik’s realm radiates optimism rather than melancholy. Across this luminous terrain, a chimaera: part bird, part sea creature, ascends alone, perhaps embodying the artist’s liberated consciousness.

Below, an Arcadian maze glows with terracotta, amber, and gold. Its intricate arches and terraces, rendered with Orlik’s distinctive brush marks, appear seductive yet entrap the viewer. Rising above is a snow-capped mountain, an insurmountable barrier that blocks escape. Together, these elements articulate the painting’s central message: conventional routes to recognition are blocked, and only extraordinary courage permits authentic creation.

The chimaera itself embodies transformation. Its body, traversed by taut red threads, bears traces of constraint; above they bind, below they fall away, capturing the moment of release. Its angelic form echoes liberation narratives from literature and myth: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), Psyche freed from her trials in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (c. 160 CE), or Ariel released from Prospero’s service in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). The visual parallel to William Blake’s America: A Prophecy (1793, British Museum), where the angel Orc breaks free from his chains, proves particularly striking.

Above, the sky shifts from ultramarine to cerulean, opening onto infinite possibility. Like Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1808-1810, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin), it suggests the sublime; yet where Friedrich’s monk remains earthbound, Orlik’s chimaera takes flight, realising what others merely imagine. The colour palette reinforces this optimism: the earth glows with warmth, the heavens shimmer with blue, and golden portals blaze with promise. These choices allude to the colour traditions of medieval manuscripts while embracing secular hope.

For Orlik, the work carries deep autobiographical meaning. Born into a Polish military family, he endured his father Josef’s opposition to his artistic ambitions, symbolised by the binding threads of patriarchal expectation. In contrast, his mother Lucyna nurtured his creativity; the white chimaera thus becomes a maternal emblem, ascending through protection and unconditional love. The mountain mirrors these barriers: just as its peak blocks physical escape, societal conventions obstructed recognition for an artist pursuing radical innovation.

“Where goest thou O thought! To what remote land is thy flight? Wilt thou bring comforts on thy wings, and dews and honey and balm…?”

– William Blake, ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’

14.

Confusion, c. 1970-1975

With artist’s stamp on verso

Acrylic on canvas

66 x 73cm.; 26 x 29in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

Marlborough, Winsor Birch, Cosmos of Dreams: Part II, 23 August – 17 September 2024

“Tell me what is a thought? And of what substance is it made?”

– William Blake, ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’

Confusion is an insight into Orlik’s synthesis of lifelong enquiry into quantum consciousness: the proposition that awareness itself follows principles akin to subatomic behaviour. With his solitary practice, free from market constraints, he was able to integrate scientific speculation with mystical conviction. This is a work that is at once an anatomical diagram, theological map, and phenomenological meditation. The painting’s main proposition is that consciousness is not fixed but infinite, recursive, and embodied.

The canvas first strikes through its morphological instability. What appears at a glance as interlacing bodies soon dissolves into neural cross-sections, before shifting again into wind-carved sandstone or coral. This fluidity recalls Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, in which perception is not static recognition but a dialogue between body and world. Within this shifting field, certain forms carry both anatomical and mystical resonance. A serpentine green tongue wends the surface: it may be read as the corpus callosum, the bridge uniting the brain’s hemispheres, but equally as a mythological serpent, symbol of imagination and transformation. At the centre, a luminous pink circle suggests the pineal gland. For Descartes, this was the “seat of the soul”; for modern science, it governs circadian rhythms – the body’s internal 24-hour clock. Orlik unites both interpretations, presenting the gland as a site where mystical light fuses with neurological function.

Drawing upon anamorphic principles familiar from Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533, National Gallery, London), Orlik creates an image that shifts with perspective: viewed closely, the brushstrokes resemble microscopic cellular activity; when seen from a distance, these same marks coalesce into the larger structures of organs and bodily cavities. These distortions mirror consciousness itself, perpetually altering as attention moves. Orlik’s adoption of hyperbolic geometry extends the analogy. Where Euclidean space insists upon stability, hyperbolic forms diverge, curve, and multiply. M.C. Escher approached similar mathematics formally; Orlik deploys them phenomenologically, suggesting thought bends and warps like spacetime within relativity physics.

Blue-grey networks thread through the composition in a modern form of horror vacui, where no space remains unoccupied. This approach is not decorative accumulation but a thematic necessity where every mark vibrates with implied

experience. Flesh tones ranging from pale rose to deep sienna evoke both corporeal warmth and spiritual resonance, while cooler hues provide tension. These chromatic relationships echo the medieval idea of musica universalis, the harmony of the cosmos expressed through proportion.

Theological dimensions are reinforced by parallels with medieval cartography. Like the mappae mundi, which combined geography with devotion, Orlik’s painting is both an anatomical reference and a spiritual chart. Cross-like motifs evoke neural branching but also the Jerusalem-centred orientation of maps such as the Hereford Map, merging bodily and sacred geographies.

The work resonates with pressing questions of identity and embodiment in a technological age. As virtual reality and neurotechnology redraw the boundaries of experience, Orlik insists upon the irreducible complexity of embodied awareness. In Confusion, disorientation becomes not a failure of understanding but an invitation to participate in consciousness as a creative process. The painting affirms that the mystery of the mind is illuminated not through resolution but through sustained engagement with its beautiful, generative complexity.

15.

End of an Affair, c. 1975-1978

With artist stamp verso

Acrylic on canvas

66 x 48cm.; 26 x 19in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited London, Winsor Birch at the Maas Gallery, Cosmos of Dreams, 9-20 August 2024

“The wolf is in charge.”

– Henry Orlik

A wolf bursts through ornate, but insubstantial, wicker window shutters with unstoppable force, asserting its territorial dominance. Painted during the mid 1970’s, the work crystallises Orlik’s conviction that romantic sanctuary remains perilously fragile when confronted by destructive power. What unfolds is both confession and critique: a deeply personal pictorial allegory on how dominance dismantles love’s delicacy.

The title itself recalls Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951), where divine jealousy disrupts human passion. Orlik translates Greene’s metaphysical disruption into the realm of masculine power, positing authority itself as the force that annihilates intimacy.

At the centre, the wolf commands attention. The animal’s presence is anchored by dark, feral hues that set the painting’s emotional weather: primal, unstable, and charged with threat. The artist’s remarks that “the wolf is in charge”, “the wolf is the boss” reverberates with autobiographical significance. Born into a Polish military household under the authority of his father Josef, Orlik knew intimately how masculine dominance enters domestic spaces, not as protector but as destroyer of fragile relationships.

In the corner of the composition a discarded woman is slumped near the bed, whom Orlik described as “fallen away” and “discarded,” embodying the affair’s casualties. She is both specific and archetypal: the woman abandoned once her purpose expires. She clings to a fruiting (but pot-bound) tree with an intrinsic volition for survival. The sleeping man under a brick-red blanket epitomises oblivious self-absorption, blind and unaware to the devastation he wreaks. This polarity echoes Picasso’s Blue Period women, tragic and exhausted; but here the woman is stripped even of dignity. Orlik’s critique is sharper: masculine power reduces women not to tragic heroines but to disposable remnants.

At the emotional heart sits the bath. Filled with water “the source of life,” as Orlik noted, it serves as both baptismal font and sacrificial altar. Its form recalls Greco-Roman bathing traditions and Christian baptismal rites, displaying how renewal and destruction coexist. Orlik’s fascination with the discovery of water on Mars underscores his conviction that the search for habitable environments spans from the cosmic to the personal. Here, the bath tests whether love can survive in climates poisoned by forthright dominance.

The window itself is no neutral backdrop. Its classical ornamentation recalls the gateways of aristocratic European estates, where power exercises its prerogatives. Yet grandeur here becomes desecrated: the gateway is breached, transforming sanctuary into vulnerability.

Orlik deepens this meditation through the fragile curtain billowing beyond the predator. The veil, delicate in palette, contrasts with the wolf’s mass. It represents secrecy, the protective shroud that permits forbidden love to exist. Easily disturbed, it embodies how emotional violence extinguishes the fragile spaces where intimacy can endure. Amidst this turbulence, a wicker chair anchors the composition. Its curved organic lines and woven textures embody Orlik’s documented affection for craft. Rooted in the basketry traditions of Eastern Europe, the chair becomes a counter-symbol of patience, continuity, and human labour. Its survival against predation gestures towards traditions resistant to mechanisation, suggesting that what is carefully crafted by hand endures where power consumes.

Alongside it, Orlik inserts one of his most enigmatic inventions: a hybrid botanical form, part flower, part phantasm. “About touch, smell, and senses, the reality, even if it might be dead already,” he said, framing it as an emblem of desire’s liminal state, between life and death, sensation and memory. The uncanny plant, simultaneously familiar and alien, embodies Freud’s notion of the repressed returning. Like the affair itself, it appears alive but carries its dissolution within.

The wolf, paradoxically solitary, carries added meaning. In nature, wolves are communal creatures bound by the pack; this lone predator disrupts natural law. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the lone wolf represents avarice, an insatiable desire that refuses satisfaction. It mirrors Orlik’s own rebellion against the commercial art world, his rejection of dealer systems in favour of authentic vision. His statement that “you must always win” against authority acquires ironic depth here: the wolf wins, but at the price of destruction.

Francis Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953, Des Moines Art Centre, Des Moines) resonate in Orlik’s exploration of power as violation, though Orlik’s symbols are less abstract. Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical architecture finds an echo in the ceremonial gateway, though Orlik populates his stage with actors charged with allegory.

The painting anticipates current discourse on toxic masculinity and domestic abuse, long before these terms entered public vocabulary. In one of Orlik’s most secret, but revealing, trompe l’oeil illusions, the diverse elements in the painting disclose themselves as a face. The leafless tree becomes windswept hair, the wolf and lolly-pop tree are the eyes, the curtain shapes the face, the pillow is the nose and the discarded woman is the curled mouth. Orlik gives us a clue to this composition in his tree in the bath which both forms the ear and fruits all the features of the face: ear, mouth, nose, moustache, eye and curving finger which wittily points us to the elements of the face. The red-covered figure

“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

constitutes either lolling tongue (which mimics the shape of the tongue in the tree) or a stream of blood from a nose-bleed which may allude to the violent outcome of the relationship at the End of an Affair

Orlik dissected the mechanics by which authority corrodes intimacy, his wolf prefigures contemporary recognition of possessiveness as destruction rather than care. Descended from a displaced Belarusian mother and a militarised Polish father, Orlik inherited a legacy of trauma and patriarchal rigidity. His insistence that “you must always win” reflects the cycle of dominance and survival ingrained across generations. The work becomes both confession and exorcism: an attempt to lay bare how power systems infiltrate love and perpetuate loss.

The wolf’s breach of sanctuary parallels authoritarian incursions into civil life: the destruction of protective boundaries, the reduction of human beings to expendable objects. The affair becomes microcosm of power’s relationship to vulnerability. The bath, once a vessel of renewal, becomes a monument to purification’s futility.

Orlik creates a work that is both intimate and universal. His wolf will complete its charge, the curtain will be blown away, and the discarded figure will remain abandoned. Yet in exposing these patterns, Orlik transforms personal trauma into artistic revelation. In our era of urgent questions about authority and vulnerability, End of an Affair endures as prescient. Its achievement lies in revealing how domination, masquerading as strength, destroys connection; and in showing, through the survival of the handwoven chair and the lingering water, that traditions of care and renewal remain possible amidst devastation.

16.

The Secret Garden, c. 1975-78

With artist’s stamp verso Acrylic on canvas

104 x 78.5cm.; 41 x 31in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

London, Obelisk Gallery, 15 November – 7 December 1978, No.21. London, Winsor Birch at the Maas Gallery, Cosmos of Dreams, 9-20 August 2024

“There is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction.”

– Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind

When four-year-old Henry Orlik arrived at Fairford Camp in 1954, he entered the largest Polish Resettlement Camp in Britain. Located on the edge of the Cotswolds, the barracks housed displaced Polish families unable to return to Soviet-controlled Poland and for the young boy the camp was both refuge and cage. Old enough to understand his family’s plight yet young enough to accept it as ordinary, Orlik absorbed this paradox of limitation, a theme that would shape his adult work. The Secret Garden, painted circa 1975–78, reimagines Frances Hodgson Burnett’s tale of childhood healing as a meditation on confinement. More than an illustration of Burnett’s story, it is a personal reflection, asking what happens when sanctuary feels safer than freedom.

An object that resembles a bouquet of roses flourishes beside steps that lead up and beyond the canvas, an escape route left unused. Nearby, an acorn, a writhing root, and a seed-like hat form a cycle of growth that never completes. Concentric circles of coral and blue cradle two white shells, symbolising anchors of memory and identity. To the right, a disembodied eye gazes skyward, fractured and vigilant, while above it two forms like holding arms, gesture between greeting and farewell. Hollow trees line the green stairs on their right reflecting absence rather than habitation.

On the left rises a brutalist wall, echoing a foreboding fortress and twentiethcentury prison design, recalling the Iron Curtain. Wittily, the elements of the timber wall perform a perfect harmonic dance, like top-hatted entertainers, whilst pointing sharply downwards with barbed arms like a perfectly drilled army. This overwhelming barrier adds a psychological weight, akin to Altdorfer’s towering architecture in The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529, Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Beside it stands a woven trellis, open yet containing, evoking the patterned borders of medieval illuminations such as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (c. 1413–16, Musée Condé, Chantilly). Where the wall embodies coercion, the trellis suggests familiarity and voluntary enclosure.

“They say I’m surrealistic. I just paint.”

– Henry Orlik, 1972

Drifting above are pale, square, spectral, cloud-like forms, memories rather than presences. They recall the dreamlike imagery of Marc Chagall’s I and the Village (1911, MoMA), as figures of cultural inheritance preserved through memory. On the ground, discarded watermelon slices interrupt pastoral harmony. Unlike Arcimboldo’s abundant harvests or Willem Kalf’s sumptuous still lifes, Orlik’s fragments suggest pleasure cut short.

Orlik himself clarified the paradox at the painting’s heart: “People are kept in prison. They have no choice to live. But the secret garden is better than escape… they’re frightened… The whole ideology feels safe. Otherwise, they’re filled by fear.” His words articulate the refugee’s dilemma: survival sometimes depends on accepting boundaries.

Like Burnett’s Mary Lennox who loses her parents abroad and finds renewal within a walled garden, Orlik was a displaced child shaped by exile. Both figures discover that their protective environments can nurture even as they restrict. Yet Orlik departs from Burnett’s symbolism of simple healing. His garden acknowledges the necessity of walls, recognising that confinement can sustain identity in hostile circumstances. For Polish families at Fairford, enclosure was both refuge and cultural greenhouse.

The disembodied eye and the hollow trees deepen this complexity. Where the Eye of Providence typically implies divine omniscience, Orlik’s eye appears vulnerable and recalls the woman’s eye in Dalí and Buñuel’s film Un Chien Andalou (1929). Here, however, it retains a measure of hope; its shadow creates a heart-shape. The tree apertures, reminiscent of de Chirico’s metaphysical voids, frame absence as a metaphor for exile’s loneliness.

Francis Bacon externalised anguish through distortion, yet Orlik conceals trauma beneath a surface of deceptive tranquillity. The canvas vibrates with excitations embodying qi, the animating energy of existence, here charged with displacement anxiety: everything trembles, nothing settles. Its rhythmic brushwork echoes Orlik’s Polish heritage, resonating like folk melody while carrying the tension of exile.

The subject speaks directly to debates about migration, borders, and sanctuary. Its hovering forms suggest uncontrollable forces, political, cultural, even climatic. Its trellis proposes a boundary that preserves connection while safeguarding identity. The painting ultimately affirms resilience; roses bloom, shells retain their spiral perfection and colours maintain harmony within limits. Orlik suggests that cultural survival sometimes requires selfimposed boundaries, that gardens of identity flourish only when shielded from assimilation’s pressures.

The painting acknowledges sacrifice, the untraversed stairs, the empty apertures, the discarded fruit, but insists that protection can be preservation. It refuses to romanticise either liberty or enclosure. The garden is not utopia, but a space where life continues, fragile yet sustained. True survival, Orlik suggests, depends on discerning the difference between prisons that destroy and sanctuaries that protect.

17.

Sheep Herding, 1980-1984

With artist’s stamp lower right

Coloured crayons and pencil

34 x 34.5cm.; 13¼ x 13½in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

London, Winsor Birch at the Maas Gallery, Cosmos of Dreams, 9-20 August 2024

Orlik’s Sheep Herding elevates pastoral tradition in painting, elevating it to a meditation on spiritual departure and cosmic awakening. The work depicts a flock of sheep cresting a gently curved green hill, while a reddish-brown wolf, having deliberately distanced itself from its pack, slopes away. All this unfolds in moonlight that echoes the visionary works of William Blake and Samuel Palmer.

The sheep surge forward, their white forms vivid against the lush hillside. Unlike the gentle flocks depicted in traditional pastoral paintings, these creatures move with the resolve of a crowd of pilgrims or refugees, a perspective that resonates with Orlik’s own background. Their retreat in the moonlight creates immediate dramatic tension: why do they turn away from such splendid radiance?

The true revelation resides in Orlik’s depiction of the sky, where concentric rings of golden yellow and deep purple radiate from a central luminous core. These expanding bands evoke Blake’s Ancient of Days (1794, British Museum, London) and Palmer’s visionary skies in works like A Hilly Scene (c. 1826-1828, Tate, London), yet Orlik’s circles have a distinctly quantum sensibility. Whereas Blake’s divine geometry arose from biblical mysticism and Palmer’s from rural transcendence, Orlik’s cosmic portal signifies his engagement with modern physics and Eastern philosophy.

The composition functions across multiple symbolic registers. The sheep, traditionally symbols of Christian discipleship, here become ambiguous figures, perhaps representing souls emerging into a new existence or humanity fleeing divine revelation. The red predator adds psychological depth: is this the shepherd guiding his flock, or danger pushing them onward; and now turned away, why has he abandoned his mission? The creature’s colour suggests both protection and threat, reminiscent of the wolves in Germanic folklore while also evoking the protective sheep dogs of pastoral tradition. Orlik reinterprets the Polish artist, Stanislaw Witkiewicz’s (1851-1915) painting, Sheep in the Mist by turning Witkiewicz’s red goat into a wolf and redirecting the sheep away from a now more-defined metaphysical sky.

Orlik’s colour relationships achieve remarkable sophistication within apparent simplicity. The golden yellows vibrate against purple shadows, creating optical tension that vividly suggests energy in motion. This chromatic interaction aligns with his quantum philosophy, where matter and consciousness exist in perpetual vibration. The hill’s globe-like curvature transforms the scene from a local landscape into a cosmic event, with sheep emerging over the curve of the Earth itself, witnessed by divine light.

The work’s religious iconography functions in a syncretic way. The concentric circles of light evoke Dante’s Paradiso, where souls form celestial roses around divine radiance. However, the mandala-like pattern also calls to mind Buddhist and Hindu cosmology, while the sheep’s pilgrimage symbolises the soul’s quest through various states of being. Orlik’s Catholic upbringing blends with his quantum mysticism to craft a universal spiritual language.

Technical examination shows the drawing’s link to Orlik’s larger paintings while asserting its own independence. Where his large finished acrylic canvases use broader and more energetic “excitation” brushstrokes to suggest molecular activity, here broad crayon strokes create similar effects through colour interaction and atmospheric perspective. The medium’s waxy texture fosters intimate viewing conditions, encouraging close engagement with each element.

The scale of the work enhances its psychological effect. Unlike large historical paintings that dominate through size, this drawing requires close viewing, fostering a personal connection with Orlik’s vision. The crayon medium itself implies immediacy and straightforwardness, the tools of childhood used for deep philosophical inquiry. Contemporary viewers might see the red pursuer as symbolising the forces behind global migration, such as war, persecution, and environmental collapse. The cosmic portal above hints at spiritual possibilities amid physical displacement. However, Orlik avoids straightforward allegory, creating a complex symbol that allows multiple interpretations without losing its mystery.

The drawing functions as a spiritual autobiography. Orlik’s journey from a displaced child to an artist mirrors the sheep’s passage across uncertain terrain towards unknown destinations. The cosmic light illuminating their path suggests that artistic vision, like divine grace, operates beyond material understanding. The red wolf’s solitary departure evokes the artist’s necessary isolation, forever separated from the herd, pursuing a different path towards the light.

This preliminary study distils themes that will expand in the larger acrylic painting, yet it achieves a complete statement in its concentrated form. The cosmic portal burns with greater intensity here, less diffused by elaborate technique. This directness serves the vision well, suggesting that profound truths often emerge most clearly through essential means.

Sheep Herding is mysterious, deeply personal, and yet universally resonant. Orlik constructs a cosmos where displacement becomes pilgrimage, where simple pastoral imagery reveals complex cosmic truths, and where the artist’s individual vision connects to eternal patterns of spiritual seeking. Artistic vision offers transformative power and the capacity to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary, the cosmic within the pastoral. Like Blake’s “world in a grain of sand,” Orlik discovers infinity on a simple hillside, proving that the most modest works can contain the most expansive truths.

18.

The Parting, c. 1975-1978

With artist’s stamp verso Acrylic on canvas

122 x 86.5cm.; 48 x 34in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

London, Drian Galleries, 2-22 March 1978, No. 14

London, Obelisk Gallery, 15 November – 7 December 1978, No. 15

London, Winsor Birch at the Maas Gallery, Cosmos of Dreams, 9-20 August 2024

“Symbolic of everything in life – it eventually pulls away from the other.”

– Henry Orlik

The Parting, is a lucid meditation on attachment and separation, conceived with pictorial intelligence and emotional candour. Biographically grounded yet philosophically expansive, the painting articulates the fragility of human bonds, sustained by tenuous yet essential connections. Orlik himself described the work in poignant terms: “We can’t help it, but we are always pulled apart. They look so balanced, but they can’t help falling over.” His words echo attachment theorist John Bowlby’s observation that “separation anxiety is considered to be a normal and adaptive response,” reminding us that awareness of loss underpins human consciousness.

The composition presents two monumental, card-like structures, wafer thin yet rising with improbable poise against a violet-to-amber sky. Each wall is punctuated by a small square aperture, functioning less as architecture than as psychological portals, eyes through which figures recognise one another across a fragile divide. Between them stretches a thick plait of hair, an organic bridge and lifeline that prevents collapse. This devastating metaphor suggests that certain human beings become the very structure of another’s existence. The image reflects Orlik’s profound bond with his mother, Lucyna. One window signals the son’s awareness of maternal sacrifice; the other, the mother’s vigilant observation of the fragile world she sustained. Orlik often used coiled hair as a symbol of female essence, timeless and life supporting. Here the mother herself is curved into an impossible posture, sacrificing independence to hold her son’s world together. The hair is not decorative but her body, bent into living architecture.

Orlik linked this directly to childhood experience: quarrels with his father countered by his mother’s shield, “Please, not in front of Henry.” Her protection, repeated and deliberate, became the bridge he depicts. The central swaddled figure can also be read as the only child, whose mere existence holds two people together, fragile and precarious against estrangement. Later, Orlik

generalised: “Mothers are much wiser than fathers. Mothers hold families together and manage emotions. Family, there’s nothing else important.” The painting thus universalises a maternal truth while registering the particularities of an only child’s dependence.

Beneath the structures lies a desert-like plain, austere and without refuge, a psychological nightmare of emptiness once the sustaining figure departs. Within this desolation, colour becomes an ethical language. Pools of green shadow beneath one structure suggest vitality and growth, the creative energy transfused by maternal encouragement. Their counterpart, blue shadows, carry ethereal associations: sky, infinity, and mortality, a love already transfigured into memory. Orlik associated these soft hues with truth itself, noting that “the truth should be beautiful.” Tenderness overlays struggle: secrecy contains feeling until it erupts in “a big explosion.”

The fragile façades recall Carlo Scarpa’s delicacy, yet Orlik’s walls embody impermanence rather than innovation. They belong equally to the surrealist lineage of Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte. Like de Chirico’s metaphysical plazas, Orlik’s forms are anthropomorphic and psychologically charged. Like Magritte’s paradoxes, his structures defy physical logic, though at a molecular register rather than through lighting or juxtaposition. The square windows are eyes, the façades masks, the ensemble a portrait of consciousness made mutual.

In 1978, Gerald Dowden, encountering The Parting without prior context, described “the convoluted tresses of faded gold”. He compared Orlik’s method to pointillisme but emphasised its difference: rather than reconstructing light clinically, Orlik’s technique was “complementary to and not in any way superior to the subject.” Dowden grasped the essence: the brushwork situates emotional climate without dominating it. He recognised what distinguishes great art, technical mastery serving emotional truth, rendering invisible structures visible.

The Parting denotes separation yet also the ordering of hair, reinforcing the maternal motif. The painting traces Orlik’s biographical arc of leaving home for London in the early 1970s, then New York, and the supportive letters his mother wrote weekly. It also anticipates bereavement: Lucyna’s eventual death devastated Orlik, who named her the most important relationship of his life. The image is thus both confession and elegy: his existence upheld by a mother who chose to become structural support, and the inevitable question of what follows once such support cannot endure.

This anticipation deepens the work’s universality. Rilke’s counsel, “Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you”, is here visualised. The barren expanse beneath the structures signifies both aftermath and origin: the ground of human connection is always the knowledge of its fragility. The apertures, as memory’s frames, preserve moments of mutual recognition, she witnessing his artistic courage, he receiving the validation that made art possible.

“He takes his inspiration from his surroundings and transforms them in an elaborate and personal way into spiritual and timeless images. In his colouring Henry Orlik expresses the ideal Slavonic feeling of his ancestors.”

– Halima Nalecz, London, February 1978

For Orlik, an only child who never married nor had children, the painting represents intimate confession. He later admitted the “implacable” support of his mother and his own “selfish” absorption in art. The work foreshadows collapse once her sustaining will was gone, perhaps explaining his later retreat from the commercial art world. Yet the painting also extracts beauty from terror. The chromatic grace of green and blue shadows, the scintillating surface of excitations, and the violet-toamber sky all convert personal fear into universal poetry.

The Parting belongs to a tradition of paintings that transform private psychological truths into images of broader human resonance. Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893, National Museum and Munch Museum, Oslo) and Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889, MoMA, New York) remain the most familiar examples, works where interior states were externalised through distortion and turbulence. Orlik’s approach is quieter yet no less ambitious: his “excitations” technique renders subatomic energy visible, proposing that love and attachment vibrate at the very frequencies of matter itself. In this respect, the painting may in the future be recognised as an iconic work within this lineage, its originality resting on the translation of quantum principles into painterly fact.

The brilliance of The Parting lies in this dual achievement: an autobiographical confession of dependence and a universal visual philosophy of love, sacrifice, and fragility. Out of architectural impossibility and scientific prescience, Orlik composes an image of relationships as structures sustained by conscious will, beautiful yet unsustainable. It is at once prophecy and elegy, intimate portrait and cosmic metaphor, reminding us that to live is always to part, and that the bonds which sustain us are both impossibly fragile and infinitely profound.

19.

Jungle, c. 1975-1978

Watercolour over pencil

82.5 x 58cm.; 32½ x 23in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

“Matter is the matrix of Spirit. Spirit is the higher state of Matter.”

– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

In the clear depths of Henry Orlik’s watercolour Jungle, we see the birth of awareness itself. This remarkable work, created in the mid-1970s, presents the artist’s idea that consciousness first appeared not on land but in the underwater realm where thought, sensation, and response developed their earliest structure. Here, in luminous underwater, Orlik suggests the moment when matter first had a faint awakening to itself.

Five sage-green verticals rise from the seafloor like primitive antennae, their surfaces resembling both kelp fronds swaying with tidal currents and the earliest structural parts of sensory organs. These organic pillars anchor the composition while functioning as receivers in what Orlik envisioned as a primordial communication network. Two additional forms angle rightward from the base, creating kinetic momentum that suggests the restless experimentation of evolutionary development: nature testing multiple solutions simultaneously.

At the heart of this submarine consciousness lies the painting’s most vital element: a distinctly ear-like formation rendered in purple tones, from which emerges an upright antenna of deeper violet. This vertical projection serves as the composition’s philosophical keystone, symbolising the pivotal moment when primitive matter gained the ability to “listen”: to receive, process, and respond to environmental signals. The ear becomes an evolutionary breakthrough, the first crude instrument capable of detecting frequencies beyond simple chemical gradients. Orlik here visualises the emergence of sensory consciousness from undifferentiated matter, marking the point when responsive awareness began its journey towards complexity.

Coral ribbons in warm orange and amber tones flow sinuously, their movements suggesting both underwater currents and the earliest neural pathways. These organic conduits pulse with bioluminescent vitality, creating networks of connection that prefigure the sophisticated communication systems consciousness would eventually develop. Their flowing quality, achieved through watercolour’s inherent transparency, evokes the luminous properties of deep-sea organisms: those creatures that generate their own light in environments where solar energy cannot penetrate. A coiled sapphire form with serpentine purpose embodies the restless energy of emerging awareness as it begins to map and understand its environment. Part marine worm, part proto-neural pathway, it represents consciousness in its exploratory phase: no longer a passive recipient of stimuli but an active investigator of possibility.

The lower layer features intricate root-like masses rendered in rich ochres and umbers, spreading across the seafloor in seemingly random yet deliberate directions. These formations suggest both coral growth patterns and the branching structures of early neural networks. Their apparent chaos follows underlying mathematical principles: the same fractal geometries governing blood vessels, tree roots, and river systems. Orlik sensed that consciousness emerges not from random development, but from nature’s fundamental patterns of growth and connection, the algorithms that shape all complex systems. Most enigmatic is the chambered structure located in the lower section of the composition, a coral formation with curved walls and a distinct opening that suggests habitation: perhaps the first protective chamber where consciousness

could develop enough security to begin the long journey towards self-awareness. The opening faces outward like an ancient portal, its warm rust and amber tones inviting exploration whilst hinting at mysteries hidden within its curved embrace. Orlik’s achievement must be understood within the Surrealist tradition of exploring unconscious processes while recognising his unique contribution to visualising evolutionary consciousness. Max Ernst’s Europe After the Rain II (1940-42, Wadsworth Atheneum) provides a precedent for biomorphic forms emerging from post-apocalyptic submarine landscapes, where Ernst’s decalcomania technique creates organic textures comparable to Orlik’s watercolour fluidity. Yves Tanguy’s Indefinite Divisibility (1942, Albright-Knox Art Gallery) establishes the spatial ambiguity and floating biomorphic vocabulary that Orlik employs for mapping unconscious territories, whilst Wolfgang Paalen’s Pays Interdit (1936-37, Private Collection) directly parallels Orlik’s interest in prehistoric consciousness through fumage techniques that visualise primordial awareness emerging from matter itself.

Yet Orlik’s approach surpasses Surrealist automatism through deliberate engagement with scientific knowledge. While Joan Miró’s Birth of the World (1925, MoMA) employs techniques to depict cosmic origins, Orlik’s networks indicate specific evolutionary processes rather than mere unconscious expression. Roberto Matta’s The Earth is a Man (1942, Art Institute of Chicago) foreshadows Orlik’s neural network visualisations, but whereas Matta’s psychological landscapes remain metaphorical, Orlik bases his imagery on contemporary neuroscientific models of consciousness arising from coordinated activity among specialised components.

This scientific foundation aligns Orlik’s visual investigations with contemporary developments in consciousness studies. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the “noosphere” in The Phenomenon of Man (1955), which describes consciousness emerging from matter through evolutionary complexity, provides a theoretical framework for understanding how Orlik’s networked awareness develops in oceanic depths. The painting visualises Teilhard’s idea that consciousness is not a supernatural intervention but a natural culmination of material complexity, achieving self-awareness through interconnected systems. The aquatic setting gains further resonance through Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological analysis in Water and Dreams (1942), where water functions as the element of psychological depth and material imagination, directly informing Orlik’s choice of submarine environment for visualising consciousness.

Contemporary literary explorations of consciousness offer ideas for understanding Orlik’s achievement. Carl Jung’s oceanic metaphors for the collective unconscious in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961) provide a direct conceptual parallel to Orlik’s imagery, especially Jung’s description of consciousness emerging from “the submarine world of the psyche.” The earantenna symbolises Jung’s fundamental capacity to “listen” to environmental and psychic signals: abilities that Jung argued modern civilisation has diminished through technological mediation of natural experience.

Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951) deepens understanding of Orlik’s coral networks of environmental knowledge. Carson’s poetic depiction of marine ecosystems as Earth’s memory banks aligns with Orlik’s portrayal of underwater formations as systems for storing and transmitting evolutionary experience. The intricate coral structures become living libraries where environmental knowledge accumulates over geological time, transforming the painting from a simple biological study into sacred geography.

The relationship of the work to contemporary neuroscientific understanding proves remarkably prescient. Modern research suggests that consciousness emerges from the interaction of numerous simple processes, akin to Orlik’s organic forms combining to create complex environmental systems. His visualisation of interconnected communication networks anticipates current models of neural processing, where awareness arises from the coordinated activity of many specialised components rather than from any single controlling mechanism. Created when environmental consciousness was emerging, but climate science remained rudimentary, Jungle carries unintentional prophetic weight. The delicate coral formations and intricate organic networks, so carefully rendered and alive with subtle energy, now resonate as documentation of what we risk losing through human disruption of planetary communication systems.

The work’s title initially appears perplexing for an underwater composition, yet it is intentionally chosen. Orlik envisioned not the terrestrial rainforest but what could be called the quantum jungle of consciousness: the dense, interconnected complexity where thought first separated itself from matter. This primordial jungle lies beneath ordinary perception, a realm where boundaries between observer and observed, mind and environment, dissolve into pure information exchange. The connection to ancient mythological traditions enhances its contemporary significance, as creation myths across cultures locate the origins of consciousness in aquatic environments: from the primordial waters of Egyptian cosmology to the oceanic womb of Hindu tradition.

The submarine environment acts as a metaphor for the unconscious depths from which all conscious experience arises, while the interconnected organisms imply that individual awareness participates in larger ecological and cosmic processes. As technology nears the creation of artificial awareness, Orlik’s vision reminds us that consciousness probably emerges from complex interactions within supportive environments rather than from isolated computational processes.

The works lasting allure lies in its resistance to settling into a fixed interpretation. Like consciousness itself, it exists in ongoing flux rather than static being. The ear-antenna keeps listening for signals from unknown sources; the coral networks pulse with information flowing between nodes; the coiled explorer investigates territories beyond the boundaries of the composition. Each viewing uncovers new relationships among elements, new possibilities for understanding how awareness might arise from seemingly inert matter through the patient build-up of responsive interactions.

Through Orlik’s synthesis of scientific observation, mythological wisdom, and artistic vision, he created a work that functions simultaneously as an evolutionary document, psychological landscape, and philosophical proposition. The watercolour demonstrates that art’s unique contribution to consciousness studies lies not in providing answers but in creating visual environments where the most profound questions can be contemplated with appropriate wonder. In our current moment of ecological crisis and technological transformation, Orlik’s vision of consciousness emerging from delicate submarine networks offers both aesthetic revelation and practical wisdom, reminding us that awareness itself depends on preserving the complex, interconnected systems that first nurtured its fragile emergence from the quantum depths of possibility. The finished acrylic canvas (84 x 137cm) was exhibited at The Obelisk Gallery, 15 Crawford Street, London, 15th November-17th December, 1978, No. 4.

20.

Cannon Balloons, c. 1975-1980

With artist’s stamp verso

Acrylic on canvas

114.5 x 152.5cm.; 45 x 60in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

London, Winsor Birch at the Maas Gallery, Cosmos of Dreams, 9-20 August 2024

Henry Orlik’s Cannon Balloons presents a militarised landscape in which fields no longer signify fertility but instead mark the conscription of nature into state power. Rolling hills, arranged with rhythmic regularity, resemble ranks of helmets, their orderliness transforming the countryside into an emblem of ideological control.

Orlik’s vision, shaped by family history in which his Belarusian mother survived Nazi labour, while his Polish father witnessed the devastation of both Nazi and Soviet forces, instilled in Orlik an acute awareness of political violence and cultural erasure. In Cannon Balloons, these experiences find form in a terrain where natural growth is replaced by patterns of surveillance and regimentation.

The land, resisting a pastoral reading, has uniform contours that expose its artificiality, each mound recalling a soldier’s helmet, suggesting protection enforced through conformity. The repetition evokes Stalin’s collectivisation, which transformed farmland into grids of administrative control. Paul Nash’s We Are Making a New World (1918, Imperial War Museum, London) showed the aftermath of battle in a scarred landscape; Orlik, by contrast, depicts the prelude, the moment when peaceful fields are absorbed into military formation. His vision recalls Nash’s Menin Road (1919, Imperial War Museum, London), but here the landscape itself becomes a weapon.

The absence of human figures is striking. It points to the deliberate erasure of peasant populations, recalling the Holodomor of 1932–33, when famine orchestrated by Stalin’s regime emptied the Ukrainian countryside. The depopulation resonates with Käthe Kollwitz’s Peasant War (1902-8, Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Berlin) cycle, though where Kollwitz memorialised revolt, Orlik records the bureaucratic removal of entire communities. When paired with the abundance of helmets, this absence also gestures to the facelessness of soldiers, a commentary on how authoritarian regimes reduce individuals to interchangeable instruments of power. On the horizon a fortress rises, echoing Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical structures. Yet while de Chirico’s spaces suggest existential solitude, Orlik’s castle symbolises surveillance, embodying the spatial distance between rulers and subjects characteristic of totalitarian order.

Recalling both barbed wire and basketry, barriers are woven across the ground as symbols of violence entangled with those of domestic craft. The paradox conveys the insidiousness of authoritarian power, which masks domination as routine labour. Above, the sky closes in as a dense canopy, enclosing rather than liberating. Its suffocating weight evokes the materiality of camouflage netting, the threat of chemical warfare and the psychic claustrophobia of life under constant scrutiny.

Suspended within this airspace are three uncanny forms. A cannon is tethered to balloons, its festive appearance belying its destructive capacity. The motif recalls wartime barrage balloons, emblems of provisional defence destined eventually to collapse. Alongside, a vast wicker bird of prey sweeps into view, its woven body echoing craft traditions now reimagined as instruments of domination. Unlike pastoral birds that signal renewal, this predator represents surveillance and aggression.

Olive greens recall military camouflage, their visual seduction underscoring the contradiction of authoritarian rhetoric: destructive systems cloaked in beauty or order. The surface is treated with Orlik’s method of excitations and horror vacui. No space is left inert; every centimetre vibrates with tension. The density produces a visual claustrophobia that mirrors the condition of life under perpetual observation.

Orlik distorts perspective through hyperbolic space, where parallels diverge and forms warp beyond rational measure. The result recalls Lovecraft’s descriptions of “non-Euclidean” worlds, where the familiar becomes estranged. For Orlik, such distortion reflects the psychological dislocation of displacement, when landscapes once familiar no longer align with memory, and home becomes territory reshaped by violence.

Where Soviet art often presented idyllic images of collective farming, as in Arkady Plastov’s harmonious harvest scenes, Orlik dismantles such fabrications, exposing the countryside’s transformation into a militarised resource. Cannon Balloons insists that truth lies not in official appearances but in the structures of control that underlie them.

The crown of straw, suspended above the landscape, derives from Belarusian ritual craft once central to rural festivals. Here it drifts untethered, heritage severed from its community of origin. Its aerial isolation embodies survival through memory alone: tradition preserved as symbol when stripped of lived context.

While the militarisation of rural land, forced migrations, and ecological devastation remain urgent global issues, Orlik’s painting illuminates their underlying logic: landscapes instrumentalised for strategy, communities uprooted, cultural memory reduced to fragments. Its literary parallels are telling. Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows (1961) chronicled the Ukrainian famine with documentary precision, while Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) allegorised the collapse of utopian promises into tyranny. Orlik, through image rather than narrative, exposes the same dynamics with unflinching clarity.

Orlik creates a vision both beautiful and terrifying. Hills become helmets, skies hide predators, craft traditions float as fragile relics. The result is a profound meditation on how regimes turn the natural world into an instrument of control, and how art can preserve what history seeks to erase. It fuses personal inheritance with collective trauma, offering a visual language capable of articulating the complexities of twentieth-century history. At once elegy and admonition, the painting stands as testament to art’s power to make visible the invisible structures of power, reminding us that beneath the apparent serenity of landscape may lie the machinery of control.

21.

Eroded Castle, 1980-1984

With artist’s stamp verso

Acrylic on canvas

124 x 107.5cm.; 49 x 42¼in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Conceived at the existential height of the Cold War, Eroded Castle is an articulate meditation on consciousness as a creative force. The painting proposes that awareness is not a passive witness to reality but the architect of dimensional frameworks. Drawing on a visual lexicon shaped by the graphic energy of 1950s comics, Orlik produced an image that reads as evolutionary treatise, cosmological diagram, and manual for constructing new realities. The result is a synthesis of speculative science, mystical insight, and painterly mastery that feels strikingly prescient.

Orlik builds his vision through an archaeological layering of forms that shift between cellular and cosmic scales. The composition reveals itself gradually: structures acquire function, symbols interlock, and the whole emerges as an encyclopaedia of dimensional engineering. Scale remains deliberately ambiguous, as though viewed alternately through microscope and telescope, insisting that the same principles govern every order of existence.

At its summit rises a monumental conical form in radiant pink. Its spiral chambers echo sacred geometries found in DNA, hurricanes, and galaxies, aligning with the Fibonacci sequence. Acting as primary generator, it channels creative energy from the hovering blue orb that presides like a consciousness template. A partner cone, sandy and outward reaching, extends toward the upper left. Together they form a polarity; masculine and feminine, generating and transmitting formative vibration. Between them opens a deep black auditory void, corrugated like an inner ear, listening to cosmic frequencies and functioning as a portal through which dimensions manifest.

Above, two flowing white forms drift with sovereign poise. They appear as time streams or travellers from parallel realities, interfaces through which adjacent systems briefly connect. Their fluidity suggests a meta dimensional current with space, time, and awareness interwoven, that sustains the entire construction.

Anchoring the composition, a central trunk ascends like a living column. It supports the orb and culminates in three triangular projections, a triple tongue evoking the Celtic triad of Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Here feminine wisdom speaks laws into being. An eye like aperture beneath the orb acts as a point of observation, where the line between seer and seen collapses, visualising the quantum observer effect as cosmic self surveillance. At the base, cavelike hollows ripple with mineral dryness: they are primordial gestation chambers responsive to vibrations gathered above.

Within this architecture, a sacred pairing of red, human scale figures generates local energy. A twisted male arcs downward in ecstatic tension, joined to the breasts of a smaller female whose stretched pose recalls Andromeda, Christian martyrdom, and Prometheus. Their union precipitates a feathered, tree like growth, consciousness blossoming through sacred sexuality. Nearby, flame

“And then the plants become confounded with the stones. Flints assume the likeness of brains; stalactites of breasts; the flower of iron resembles a figured tapestry.”

– Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony

shaped brackets suggest alchemical vessels, combustion chambers that transmute erotic energy into creative force. Resonances with Buddhist aureoles and Bernini’s Saint Teresa underscore energy in transit rather than stasis.

Below, a serpent glides horizontally. No longer a biblical deceiver, it is the catalyst of awakening, transforming innocence into constructive agency. Two black apertures appear as gateways or gestational chambers, transitional sites for emerging awareness. From this matrix arises a hybrid warrior being, skull profiled yet nobly adapted. Green, finger like excrescences tipped in crimson serve as antennae, tuned to subtle shifts and sacred energies. A beak like instrument proposes communication and reproduction, while a tusk offers defence and penetration. The figure embodies the successful integration of human consciousness with cosmic conditions.

Scattered fragments of dark grey space matter anchor the system, preventing dispersal into pure energy while supplying resources for construction.

Dialogues with art history sharpen Orlik’s intentions. Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500; Museo del Prado, Madrid) offered a precedent in its fusion of sexuality, spirituality, and transformation, yet Bosch left pleasure morally ambiguous. Orlik resolves this: sexuality is the operative principle of creation. Yves Tanguy’s surrealist biomorphs, for instance Indefinite Divisibility (1942; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York), remain enigmatic, while Orlik assigns functional roles to every form. Georgia O’Keeffe’s floral and geological abstractions revealed erotic dimensions within nature; Orlik magnifies such principles to cosmic scale. Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi (c. 1500; Private Collection) placed authority in Christ’s crystal orb, while Orlik treats the orb as blueprint, part of a working construction site.

The painting converses equally with science. Its spatial logic intimates the negatively curved geometries now recognised in quantum cosmology. White currents, conch spirals, and undulating membranes conjure a universe where parallel lines diverge, and surfaces expand exponentially. Orlik anticipates this, suggesting consciousness not only occupies but elaborates curved space.

The work engages tantric thought, where sexual energy is divine force, scaling the union of Shiva and Shakti to cosmic proportions, manifested in Nataraja. Kabbalistic traditions offer another framework: the central trunk is a living Tree of Life, like the sephirotic structure of Sha’arei Ora (1554), a channel through which divine names generate laws. Jung’s hieros gamos appears here not only as psychological integration but as cosmotechnical operation, the union of opposites fabricating new worlds.

Orlik’s thousands of spiralled brushstrokes produce optical harmonics. Derived from physics’ notion of excited states, they transform the painting into a sound system: union generates frequencies, amplified by conches, processed by the

auditory void, and articulated by the triple tongue. His adoption of horror vacui, familiar from Jean Duvet or Adolf Wölfli, rejects emptiness not from fear but conviction: space is never void but field. Each excrescence, familiar from Surrealism, is here purposeful, a sensor, conduit, or brace within the architecture. In the nuclear shadow, Orlik imagines not destruction but escape routes: consciousness constructing its own survival. Mythologies are rewritten accordingly. The serpent catalyses ascent, not downfall; the black portals are gateways, not punishments. The castle erodes, yet simultaneously regenerates, demonstrating that decay and creation interlace.

The painting choreographs dynamic relationships: conical transmitters converse with the orb template; supports counterpoint crystalline fragments; white currents link the whole to distant networks. Rather than a static cosmology or landscape, this is a worksite, a collaborative theatre where union, observation, and infrastructure operate in multidimensional time.

Eroded Castle thus extends art’s remit into the articulation of reality construction. Through meticulous, scientifically inflected mark making, Orlik renders visible the processes by which awareness designs and builds its environments. The painting functions simultaneously as dimensional blueprint, spiritual manual, and aesthetic achievement.

Traditional narratives offered redemption through suffering; Orlik depicts salvation forged through construction, survival as a species level strategy. Sacred union generates architecture, knowledge becomes engineering, and evolved beings acquire new senses for further creation.

The painting endures because it insists that consciousness is constructive. It shows awareness not simply adapting but engineering the frameworks within which evolution unfolds collaboratively and systematically across scales. By revealing these principles through paint, Orlik affirms that in an era of ecological and technological upheaval, consciousness itself retains the power to craft new realities.

Eroded Castle finally testifies to the porous thresholds between dreamer and architect, individual and cosmos. Its message is one of hope: that building, ecstatic, patient, and visionary, remains the essential vocation of consciousness across the vast spans of cosmic time.

22.

Totem, 1980-1984

With artists stamp verso

Acrylic on canvas

124 x 104cm.; 48½ x 41in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

New York, Winsor Birch at the Kate Oh Gallery, Surreal Metropolis: Looking for America, 17-29 June 2025

In the rippling vortex of Totem, Henry Orlik conjures a vision of birth, rupture, and prophecy. From the earth’s wounded surface, a space shuttle erupts like a deity from geological trauma, fusing modern technology with sacred Indigenous architecture. Painted in a rented studio space on 4th Avenue near Union Square and shipped to England just months before the Challenger disaster of 1986, the canvas embodies what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin termed “the terrible gift of foresight”: an artist’s capacity to intuit civilisational patterns before they emerge in history. That tragic event, later echoed by the Columbia disaster of 2003, underscores the painting’s prophetic urgency. Totem is at once excavation and revelation, compelling us to confront a civilisation caught between ancestral origins and cosmic ambition.

The painting’s central figure defies categorisation: part shuttle, part totem, part cosmic jack-in-the-box. It embodies what Orlik described as the ‘heyoka’, the sacred clown who exposes truth through paradox. The fuselage points deliberately to the sky, embodying the human aspiration to explore yet, the trailing orange-red filaments despite representing the workings of the vehicle, symbolise the human sacrifice of space exploration. With the figure hovering within an amphitheatre that is simultaneously crater and ceremonial ground, the image becomes an unstable balancing act embodying the paradox of modernity: technological precision undermined by spiritual instability.

Orlik’s surface is alive with his ‘excitations’. This radical technique transforms paint into energy, producing vibrating topographies in ochre, blood-red, and green that ripple like seismic waves or ceremonial mandalas. Within these undulations, spectral figures and forms emerge and dissolve, evoking creation’s primordial pulse.

The totem pole’s cultural resonance is pivotal. For the peoples of the Pacific Northwest, totems function as vertical archives of lineage, memory, and cosmology. Orlik’s transposition of this ancient system onto NASA’s shuttle programme creates a collision of technologies: carved cedar and ceramic tile, ancestral record and cosmic vessel. His shuttle-totem is both deity and sacrifice, its flames signifying propulsion and immolation.

At the axis of this vision lies a stark motif: a black-haired scalp, braided and pierced by a rigid spike. This vertical thrust functions as axis mundi, binding earth to sky, yet also symbolises conquest and appropriation. Here Orlik engages what Michel Foucault called the “archaeology of knowledge”: the violent processes by which dominant cultures absorb, appropriate, and transform indigenous systems to serve imperial purposes. The scalp’s placement within the totemic structure suggests that Native American wisdom is both foundation and victim of America’s technological empire, essential for integrity yet wounded by the very system it supports.

“It is the avowed aim of the surrealist movement to reduce and finally dispose altogether of the flagrant contradictions that exists between dream and waking life, the “unreal” and the “real”, the unconscious and the conscious.”

– David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism, 1935

The feathered base, at once funeral pyre and launch pad, deepens the symbolism. In Native American practice, feathers mediate between realms; eagle feathers mark courage and vision. Orlik’s transformation of these sacred objects into aerospace infrastructure casts space exploration as ritual sacrifice, human lives offered in pursuit of progress.

Chromatically, Orlik weaves matter and spirit. The nose cone’s celestial blues contrast with the earthen tones of the base, where casino-chip hues allude to speculation and risk. This chromatic dialogue dramatises the tension between ascendence and gravity. Each brushstroke contributes to a larger harmonic structure, a symphony of earth and sky.

The painting reflects Orlik’s conviction that brushstrokes embody consciousness. His “living line,” as sensitive as a lie detector, registers emotional and spiritual states, transforming canvas into a field of energy akin to physicist David Bohm’s “implicate order.” At this quantum level, rocket and totem, destruction and renewal, coexist as potentialities. Orlik’s art insists that separateness is illusory: flames, stars, and human striving are all strands in a unified fabric.

This paradoxical imagery also carries comic inflections. The shuttletotem is a sacred clown, simultaneously crashing and ascending, tragic and absurd. In this Orlik channels the cyclical wisdom of Indigenous traditions: death as renewal, failure as rebirth. The echoes of Dante’s Paradiso and Pueblo sand paintings situate the work between Christian mysticism and Native spirituality, a secular cosmology rendered through paint.

Created amid Reagan-era America, Totem reflects the metaphysics of displacement. Orlik’s immigrant perspective allowed him to perceive technological spectacle as a mask for imperial ambition. The shuttle programme, celebrated as progress, exemplified what Guy Debord termed the “society of the spectacle,” where reality is mediated by image. For Orlik, whose family endured the displacements of war, technological triumph could never be disentangled from violence and erasure.

The painting operates as Jungian compensation, balancing cultural assumptions with archetypal imagery. By uniting rocket and totem, scalp and spike, crater and mandala, Orlik externalises unconscious wisdom, offering viewers the possibility of what Jung called “cosmic consciousness.” From this elevated vantage, individual and collective histories converge in visionary pattern.

Orlik’s affinities range from German Expressionism to Blake and Spencer, visionary artists who transformed history into revelation. His originality lies in fusing these legacies with contemporary technology and physics, producing quantum mysticism: a visual philosophy where consciousness and matter are interwoven.

In today’s context of ecological crisis and space tourism, the painting’s prophetic urgency is unmistakable. It warns of hubris, of progress pursued without wisdom, yet also gestures toward synthesis. Technological civilisation may yet integrate ancestral knowledge if it recognises the unity of matter and spirit. Orlik insists that progress must not obliterate mystery but cultivate it; must not erase origins but transform them into resources for ascendence.

For the artist, painting was a priestly vocation, a means of channelling energy. Totem crystallises his experience of displacement, his dialogue with philosophy and physics, and his revolutionary technique. It is both confession and culmination, tragedy and comedy, prophecy and prayer. In its layered polysemy, the work refuses reductive interpretation, demanding to be read historically, spiritually, and technologically at once.

Totem presents humanity suspended between roots and stars, destruction and renewal. It proposes that only by honouring the wisdom embedded in ancestral traditions can civilisation survive its Promethean ascent. Orlik’s masterpiece thus remains profoundly relevant: a visionary reminder that true advancement lies not in conquest but in synthesis, not in domination but in conscious participation in the cosmic order.

Fighting Skyscrapers, New York, c. 1982

With artist’s stamp verso Oil on canvas

126.5 x 105.5cm.; 50 x 41½in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited New York, Winsor Birch at the Kate Oh Gallery, Surreal Metropolis: Looking for America, 17-29 June 2025

“My understanding of how the world works and what it means is through my values, but the values that I create are not made up for convenience, their creation is evoked by the free dialogue between the self that I am now and my world as it is now. We bring our world and ourselves into being through a shared creative response to the world and each other. Each person’s free choice collectively contributes to the fate of the world.”

– Henry Orlik, ‘Let the Spirit be Moved’

Fighting Skyscrapers (c. 1980–1985) is one of Henry Orlik’s most intense and dramatic works, painted shortly after his arrival in New York. The painting depicts two monumental towers, their summits hidden by a dark horizontal cloud. For the viewer in the twenty-first century, it is almost impossible to encounter the canvas without recalling the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001. Yet this is not a literal prediction but an allegory of ideological conflict and urban alienation. The left tower, striped red and white, sprouts nine tendril-like forms; the right, grey and ribbed, supports a heavy mammalian creature draped in cloth. Identical in structure but opposed in spirit, the towers embody ideological doubles: systems that could recognise similarity yet confront each other as enemies. Orlik arrived in New York in 1980, entering a city of both promise and crucible. Manhattan had long attracted displaced European artists seeking freedom and audiences, and Orlik brought with him a perspective shaped by his European heritage and the twin traumas of Nazism and Soviet rule. It was here that he became acutely aware of how opposed ideologies could mirror each other while remaining irreconcilable, a tension reflected in New York’s financial and commercial temples, the skyscrapers themselves. 23.

These towering forms set the stage for his drama: symbols of New York’s power and commerce, yet also factories of anonymity that reduce workers to cogs in a machine. Citizens below are largely invisible, shielded or complicit, yet subject to the tension above. High-rises rise above nature, separating humans from the organic world; and clouds, tendrils, and beasts, reintroduce the non-human. Architecture becomes organism, reflecting Orlik’s engagement with Surrealist methods, which sought to reveal the unconscious beneath the familiar. Seen through this lens, the skyscrapers are not merely buildings but extensions of consciousness, rendering the city itself a living body, its hidden drives made visible in monstrous, physical form.

Orlik translated this observation into his distinctive excitation brushstrokes: thousands of tiny, directional marks that elsewhere fuse with forms to create unity, but here remain jagged, forceful, and abrasive. Danah Zohar, whose writings Orlik read closely, describes the quantum world as a “chain of evolving consciousness” in which “Things emerge as fluctuations (excitations) in the vacuum, grow towards renewed coherence, and return to the vacuum as enriched fluctuations” (The Quantum Self). In Fighting Skyscrapers, these “excitations” clash without resolution, filling the surface with sustained, unresolved tension. To amplify this effect, Orlik employed a “human sized” canvas, over a metre high, inviting a forced intimacy between the viewer and painting. The viewer is caught between the massive confrontation and the seething surface of minute excitations.

It is within this charged, turbulent space that the creatures atop the towers fulfil their symbolic purpose. Their forms mirror each other across the canvas, yet the cloud between them blocks any connection, leaving the towers trapped in permanent opposition. Jung’s insight, quoted by Zohar “If things go wrong in the world, this is because something is wrong with the individual, because something is wrong with me. Therefore, if I am sensible, I shall put myself right first” resonates here, as the creatures embody the hidden drives and unacknowledged impulses that emerge when individuals and societies fail to confront their own inner conflicts.

Orlik’s work engages with the larger tradition of New York imagery. Diego Rivera’s Frozen Assets (1931; Museum of Modern Art, New York) exposed Depression-era inequality, juxtaposing monumental architecture with dispossessed workers. Andy Warhol and John Palmer’s Empire (1964 MoMA) offered an eight-hour meditation on the Empire State Building’s endurance, while Robert Moskowitz painted the Twin Towers as stark silhouettes, emphasising formal power (1980s, MoMA, New York). Orlik inherits this lineage but transforms it. He takes Moskowitz’s solemn outline and fills it with agitation, Warhol’s duration and replaces it with menace, and turns Hopper’s alienation into metaphysical conflict. The skyscraper emerges as a living creature of dream and ideology.

“this separation between past, present and future has the value of mere illusion, however tenacious.”

– Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Building on this dialogue, Orlik gives his towers meaning beyond architecture, turning them into symbols of political conflict and social tension. Some have seen in the red-striped tower a reference to American conservatism, others to Soviet communism. The grey tower might evoke the Democrats, fascism, or technocracy. The painting captures the contested elections of 1980 and 1984, but goes beyond specific events, showing the built-in conflicts of ideological systems rather than the actions of individuals. The faceless beasts control the city below, representing the systemic forces that control and shape lives while the citizens, shielded from conflict, remain unaware or complicit.

After 2001, the painting acquired a second life as prophetic. Viewers could not help but see in the dark cloud band the belts of fire and smoke that wrapped the towers, in the emanations from the red-striped building the plumes of black smoke that billowed from one of the skyscrapers. The canvas seemed to anticipate the unimaginable. Yet it is essential to underline that its true prophetic force lies not in predicting one event but in diagnosing the inevitability of conflict between systems that refuse coherence.

The work also resonates with Teilhard de Chardin’s philosophy: humanity strives toward a point of complete coherence, the Omega Point, yet is always vulnerable to disorder and division. Orlik’s painting stages this tension, portraying the struggle between chaos and unity. Jung’s analysis of the shadow adds another dimension: the beasts are projections of what societies deny within themselves. Only by recognising that shadow as our own can we move toward integration, helping divided forces come together and create balance within society.

The true weight of the painting lies in the lives below, caught in the shadow of the towers’ struggle. Despite the absence of people, every block suggests lives lived in routine: mornings negotiated, lunches eaten, kindnesses offered, cruelties enacted. These lives are subjected to the conflict above, whether they see it or not. The excitations that animate the towers also animate the city below, reminding us that instability pervades every level. The monsters at the top are symptoms of a larger system under stress.

Ultimately, Fighting Skyscrapers demonstrates Orlik’s lasting significance, his blend of European philosophical insight with American urban experience to reveal how architecture, psychology, and politics intersect in human struggle. In anticipating both history’s recurring struggles and the enduring impact of his own work, Orlik created more than a historical record. He produced a work that deepens our understanding of power, consciousness, and modern alienation, joining the canon of defining images guiding each generation to grasp the complexities of their social and political world.

24. Workers Rolling into NYC, 1980-1984

Pencil

With artist’s stamp lower right

34.5 x 36.5cm.; 13½ x 14in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

New York, Winsor Birch at the Kate Oh Gallery, Surreal Metropolis: Looking for America, 17-29 June 2025

Henri Bergson’s notion of ‘pure duration’, the suspension of time before crystallisation into final form, provides a compelling lens through which to view Henry Orlik’s preparatory drawing for Workers Rolling into New York. In this monochrome vision, Orlik captures not merely the image but the very energy of creation, the skeleton of an idea before it is clothed in colour. Where the painted version tempers severity with romance, the graphite work confronts us with unadorned intensity: the sky becomes industrial, the city less dreamscape than formidable construct.

By stripping away colour, he compels us to attend to form, idea, and structure, exposing the philosophical heart of Orlik’s project. The reduction of workers to spheres is at once a commentary on dehumanisation and a gesture towards perfection. Such paradox, where critique and ideal coexist, constitutes Orlik’s metaphysical minimalism. The work anticipates later conceptual concerns where essence supersedes ornament.

Far from a mere study, this drawing asserts itself as a complete artistic statement. It presents an architectonic vision of the metropolis as a singular monumental edifice rather than a collection of skyscrapers. The central tower, angular and aspiring, rises like a protagonist in Orlik’s urban drama. Its sharply faceted planes, articulated through tonal gradation, echo Gothic ambition yet remain resolutely modern, a geometric symbol of industrial power.

Above, a plume of smoke or vapour introduces a dynamic counterpoint. Graphite lends it particular potency, allowing for a subtle dissolution of form that becomes a metaphor for uncertainty: material solidity gives way to something more ephemeral and questioning. This interplay between permanence and transience underscores Orlik’s exploration of the city as both physical structure and metaphysical symbol.

Scattered across the composition, spherical forms embody the workers themselves, abstracted into rolling orbs. In this monochrome realm, they lose individuality, becoming components of a larger system. Their anonymity is deliberate, a visual shorthand for labour subsumed within industrial machinery. The pencil’s democracy of tone reinforces this: in a drained world of greys, no worker stands apart.

The pathways along which these figures travel are rendered with striking attention to texture. Cross-hatching and varied pressure create rutted surfaces that suggest the wear of countless journeys, echoing the physical infrastructure of urban life. These marks ground Orlik’s vision in social reality, embedding abstract geometry within lived experience.

The drawing invites comparison with M.C. Escher’s investigations of cyclical movement and geometric order. Like Escher, Orlik transforms ordinary human motion into a sublime abstraction governed by unseen laws. Yet where Escher’s

spaces exist in mathematical impossibility, Orlik’s remain tethered to the recognisable structures of industrial society. His achievement lies in this fusion of rigour with social consciousness, a “social geometry” that elevates repetitive urban patterns into philosophical commentary.

Orlik’s preparatory drawing is no subordinate sketch but a revelation in its own right. It distils the genesis of his vision into an austere yet luminous composition. In its quiet monochrome, the work whispers where the finished painting sings, yet that whisper conveys truths that resonate with equal, if not greater, profundity. It preserves the moment of pure thought, the philosophical spark of creation, before colour transforms it into symphonic spectacle.

“This must be the land of Oz.”

– Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

25.

Workers Rolling into NYC, 1980-1984

With artist’s stamp verso

Acrylic on canvas

123.5 x 121cm.; 48½ x 47½in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

New York, Winsor Birch at the Kate Oh Gallery, Surreal Metropolis: Looking for America, 17-29 June 2025

In the city, a large conglomeration of colourful skyscrapers looms tall, imposing and magical, in the distance, like a fairytale castle. The workers (as colourful balls) roll into work, like a giant pinball game, along grey, geometric pathways. A white plume of smoke rises out of the topmost tower, like the feather in a jaunty medieval cap. The castlebuildings appear like our first glimpse of the Emerald City at the end of the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz and like the opening scenes in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis where tall buildings rise in fabulous Art Deco, sci-fi futuristic combination. Glorious alternating rays of pink-red and yellow fan out in the sky like a delightful sunrise. The city is glossy, beautiful and energetic.

It seems that all is harmony in the Metropolis where everything rolls along rhythmically on its allotted path. The balls – the workers – are part of the giant game, the big picture, inherent to the balance of the city, as they roll into work, day in day out, and roll back again. On closer inspection, however, we notice that there are pitfalls: the balls can roll off course, or plummet down dark holes to who knows where? The balls are microcosmic, ‘billiard like particles … locked away in their own space and time’ which can ‘bounce off and clash with one another’ (Orlik, ‘To Make Visible the Invisible’). The paths no longer appear smooth but rutted with unpredictable indentations. The city works to its own rhythm: do we see the harmony, or do we see the ruts, the pitfalls and the smoke?

The tag line in Metropolis is ‘The mediator between the head and the hands is the heart’. For the city, this means that owner and worker (employer and employee) must have a mutual understanding and trust. The rhythm of the city relies on them and in turn, they rely on the city. It is a macrocosm of microcosmic interconnections. For the artist this suggests that the head has the inspiration for the work of art and the hands enact this inspiration. For art to be truly great, the heart must mediate to give something beyond what the visionary artist William Blake called ‘single vision’. It must offer truth and, for Orlik, this is looking beyond the materialist culture to an invisible inner life. Orlik believes, ‘the basic evolutionary drive of the universe in living systems and in human consciousness is towards more and greater ordered coherence. But in a culture where misinformation is increasingly sophisticated, we need to engage our instinct, intuition, to separate true from false’. (Orlik, ‘Let the Spirit be Moved’, 1994).

Orlik is aware of the vast cities we populate ‘where individual choice and action seem to make no difference to what goes on around us.’ (Henry Orlik, ‘Let the Spirit be Moved’, 1994). However, Orlik steadfastly maintains: ‘There is no separateness in reality, everything flows into one another, everything is related, as is everything in my painting.’ ‘No part or aspect of reality should be ignored or thought of as irrelevant’. (Henry Orlik, ‘Let the Spirit be Moved’, 1994). It is then that the true rhythm of life in all its complexity lives harmoniously, body and mind. Orlik likens this to music: ‘if we reduce a symphony to the notes and say there are so many vibrations in various notes, we lose the music of the thing, the reality. The same way we lose the reality of the universe if we merely describe in quantitative terms the particles, the universe is composed of.’ (Orlik, ‘To make visible the invisible.’)

26.

Summer, NYC, c. 1984

With artist stamp lower right Coloured crayons and pencil

38 x 37.5cm.; 15 x 14¾in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

New York, Winsor Birch at the Kate Oh Gallery, Surreal Metropolis: Looking for America, 17-29 June 2025

Henry Orlik’s Summer was created in his final Manhattan residency, within a stifling apartment that lacked air conditioning. The conditions were intolerable: a negligent landlord left the space infested with vermin, the cooling system remained broken through the suffocating heat, and art dealers continually turned him away. Penniless and surviving only through his mother’s generosity, Orlik endured an existence marked by alienation and precarity. He spoke of feeling “washed out, exhausted by it all,” and the act of creation became an act of survival. Out of this ordeal emerged this profound psychological selfportrait, where urban observation fuses with interior crisis to produce a visionary cartography of consciousness under siege.

Through coloured crayons and pencil, chosen for their chalky, granular texture, Orlik achieves haptic empathy, where every mark bears the tremor of his agitated state. Unlike the permanence of oil or acrylic, this fragile medium heightens immediacy, aligning with his metaphysical minimalism: the stripping away of excess to reveal unfiltered psychological truth.

Flame-like structures rise from cross-hatched foundations, suggesting both Manhattan towers and neural combustion within an overheated skull. Three primary eruptions recall the sacred trinity of mind, body, and spirit, all caught in simultaneous crisis. Darkness envelops these forms, functioning at once as urban shadow and cranial interior. Where Munch’s The Scream (1893; National Gallery, Oslo) mapped psychic trauma onto an external landscape, Orlik’s stealth surrealism embeds emergency within the familiar grammar of observational drawing, its true subject only revealed through prolonged contemplation.

Beyond its immediate intensity, Summer recalls the extremity that fuelled Van Gogh’s blazing cypresses or Munch’s anguished figures, however, it differs in its concealment of crisis within observation. Orlik’s affinities extend to the psychological architectures of Max Ernst and the metaphysical urban visions of Giorgio de Chirico, whose work he encountered during London’s surrealist revival of the 1970s. By treating the city as mental theatre rather than geographical document, he developed a European-inflected psychological surrealism applied to distinctly American subjects.

The significance of Summer extends beyond personal biography. Orlik’s evocation of an urban environment as a neurological assault system anticipates contemporary debates on climate change and the mental health consequences of urban heat. What was once the private ordeal of a solitary artist now appears as prophecy of collective vulnerability.

27.

Wall Street, NYC, c. 1982-1984

With artist’s stamp version

Acrylic on canvas

121 x 121cm.; 47½ x 47½in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

New York, Winsor Birch at the Kate Oh Gallery, Surreal Metropolis: Looking for America, 17-29 June 2025

In Wall Street, New York City, Orlik depicts the view from his apartment looking onto the financial heart of New York. The architecture takes on a life of its own; a cityscape filled with diverse buildings of different colours and shapes and anthropomorphic suggestions; at once sinister, ominous and humorous. A snake slithers out of a wall, a deceptive serpent and tempter but also a symbol of transformation and regeneration; a plait of hair is lowered from a high arched window, like Rapunzel’s braid, as an attempt at escape; a pointed pink tongue protrudes rudely from a double-arched window; beneath it, the building takes on the face of a dragon, with windows that are spikey teeth and a porthole window for an eye. Towards the background, a large squat building’s windows become its triangular nose, a grill of dark rectangular windows represents its grinning mouth and two red, menacing square windows are its eyes.

Walking down Wall Street, one can see how the buildings sparked Orlik’s imagination. A glance, for example, at the rectangular windows and doorway of 23 Wall Street can readily conjure up a face. Orlik takes such ideas and characteristically brings them to life through his unique vision of the world, and in so doing urging the viewer to question their environment.

A black eagle banner hangs prominently in the work, angled like a flag. Symbolically, it has been used by imperial empires and nations across the ages; a representation of strength, freedom and courage, but also of the power and authority of governments. Opposite, we have a glimpse of an apartment starkly lit, two chairs around a table with a picture above. It is a scene of domesticity, a hieroglyphic reminder of the lives past, present and future that occupy the city, benefiting from or a slave to commerce? The façade of the Stock Exchange declares, ‘Protecting the Rights of Man’, a principle often neglected and which perhaps explains why the balustrades below the apartment are see-through; it lacks substance and structure, much like a deck of cards.

Beneath the balustrade hangs a swinging lightbulb from a single thread. It is both a symbol of torture and enlightenment. To its side beneath a jaunty yellow, blue and pink awning lies a naked woman, facing away from the buildings. Orlik has used this image of a sleeping woman in other dream-imagery paintings as a symbol of escape; she sleeps, but all around her, her dreams take form. Look closely to her left and a small, indistinct silhouetted statue stands at the bottom of the painting – like a nymph about to dive into a pool, as part of the woman’s dream, she dives into the depths of her subconscious or freedom from it.

28.

Dunes, c. 1982-1984

With artist’s stamp lower left Pencil

66 x 91cm.; 26 x 35¾in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

Marlborough, Winsor Birch, Cosmos of Dreams: Part II, 23 August – 17 September 2024

“I need to animate the surface of the picture to express the dialogue that I conduct with whatever I observe and the way it moves my spirit.”

– Henry Orlik

Henry Orlik’s Dunes stems from the artist’s transformative encounter in 1980 with California’s desert landscape, where ancient seabeds rise thousands of feet above the current ocean level. For Orlik, these formations, the rolling hills of Death Valley and the sculptural terrain of the Mojave, revealed themselves as images of marine memory, their undulating shapes formed first by vanished seas, then by wind. The composition presents an immediately disorienting spatial puzzle. Are we viewing a horizontal expanse of dunes, or looking down from some impossible aerial perspective? Orlik deliberately refuses to resolve this ambiguity. The flowing forms seem to breathe with their own rhythm, suggesting creatures as much as landscape. There is something cetacean about these shapes, the gentle curves and massive scale of whale forms moving through deep water. Yet these are clearly terrestrial formations, their surfaces textured with the patient accumulation of countless graphite marks.

Orlik’s skill with the pencil creates a surface that pulses with barely perceptible life, as if the landscape itself were breathing. This is not the quantum field energy that characterises his painted work: it is something older, more fundamental. The marks accumulate like grains of sand deposited by invisible currents, building forms that feel both observed and remembered.

The drawing’s most impressive achievement lies in its suggestion of forms that carry within them the morphological memory of ancient marine life and the flowing movements of creatures that navigated oceanic environments millions of years before the emergence of terrestrial consciousness. The California desert, surrounded by fossils of sea creatures embedded in rock, retains the signatures of its aquatic past; the dunes become archives of evolutionary memory.

This relates to core aspects of Orlik’s identity as a displaced artist. Born into the aftermath of European catastrophe and raised amidst different languages and cultures, he developed a keen sensitivity to how the past persists within present forms. His family’s nomadic life—from German refugee camps to

resettlements in England—taught him that identity functions like sedimentary layers: experiences accumulating over time to shape the flowing landscape of consciousness. In the California desert, he recognised this same principle operating across geological ages.

The relationship of the work to postwar abstraction becomes most evident when comparing it to Helen Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea (1952, National Gallery of Art, Washington). Both artists aimed to depict the essential movement of the landscape rather than its surface appearance. Frankenthaler achieved this through stained colour that bleeds across unprimed canvas, and Orlik constructs his forms through accumulated graphite deposits that reflect the actual processes of geological formation. The distinction is significant: Frankenthaler’s technique aligns with painting’s history, while Orlik’s echoes landscape’s own methods of self-creation.

More importantly, Dunes operates within the tradition established by Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970, Great Salt Lake, Utah). Both works engage with deep geological time, recognising landscape as an active force rather than passive subject matter. Orlik reverses Smithson’s approach: where the land artist imposed geometric forms upon natural terrain, Orlik allows geological processes to inform artistic technique. His drawing becomes a form of collaboration with, rather than intervention in, natural systems.

“And thus I turn my face to where my whole soul seeks.”

– William Blake, ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’

The lack of a horizon line is essential. Traditional landscapes depend on this organising principle to set the viewpoint and scale. Orlik’s removal of such reference points creates what feels like a cosmic landscape—forms that could exist on any planet where geological processes occur. This universality supports his deeper aim: suggesting that consciousness itself might be structured by similar principles, flowing and building across timescales that dwarf individual human experience.

The work’s technical restraint warrants emphasis. Working in pencil rather than his characteristic acrylic allows Orlik to explore pure form and movement without the distractions of colour. The monochromatic approach heightens our focus on the flowing relationships between shapes, the way each curve suggests the next in an endless sequence of geological becoming. It is drawing at its most essential—line and tone creating spaces that feel both intimate and vast.

For Orlik personally, Dunes signifies a sense of homecoming, not to any specific place but to a way of being in landscape that surpasses cultural boundaries. His European background, American experience, and artistic vision merge in these flowing forms that imply belonging not to any nation but to the planet itself. The drawing becomes a meditation on what endures beneath the surface disruptions of political history: the deeper currents of geological and evolutionary change that connect all terrestrial life to its oceanic origins.

The work precedes current scientific understanding of how consciousness might work, based on principles observable in natural systems. Contemporary neuroscience suggests that awareness arises from the interaction of many simple processes, akin to the dunes forming from the combined action of wind, water, and time. Orlik manages an extraodinary depth of imagery: the shapes are creases on a bedspread, and folds in both brain and landmass. His achievement is in making this connection visible through purely artistic means, creating shapes that evoke both landscape and mind as expressions of similar underlying dynamics.

Viewed today, Dunes, like many of Orlik’s visionary works, feels notably prophetic. In an age when human activity threatens the stability of geological systems, Orlik’s vision of landscape as a repository of deep time carries urgency. The drawing indicates that our current environmental crisis is not just a political or economic failure but a fundamental misunderstanding. These dunes have been forming for millions of years; human civilisation is scarcely a fleeting moment in their ongoing development.

Dunes excavates layers of time usually hidden from ordinary perception. Through the careful accumulation of graphite marks, Orlik gains access to awareness that functions across different scales, linking individual human experiences to the vast processes shaping the planetary surface. In this way, Dunes is a work that broadens the possibilities of drawing, showing that pencil and paper remain effective tools for exploring the deepest continuity between mind and world.

29.

Parting Dunes, c. 1982-1984

Acrylic on canvas

123 x 93cm.; 48½ x 36½in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

“But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

– William Butler Yeats, ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’

In Parting Dunes, Orlik weaves memories of the California mountains with the intensity of New York City life, creating a work of recollection, longing, and artistic transformation.

At first glance the painting presents an immediate spatial contradiction. Are we looking across a limitless horizon, or peering down from a cosmic height? Orlik intentionally fosters this perspectival ambiguity, to create a visual puzzle that encourages viewers to abandon fixed viewpoints and consider how consciousness constructs coherent experience from fragments of sensation and memory.

The composition divides into three interdependent realms. Above, a desolate moonscape of grey, silver, and pewter evokes a dormant world, its slow undulations reflecting the quiet patience of nature. The forms create a landscape that belongs neither to Earth nor to any known planet, but to the liminal spaces between worlds. Human shapes lie embedded within the terrain, half-hidden yet unmistakable: torsos, faces, limbs that merge back into stone. Here consciousness feels native to the terrain rather than imposed upon it, recalling Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series but reversing her intent: where Mendieta suggested presence by showing only the body’s outline, Orlik shows awareness rising from the landscape itself.

The central band functions not just as a horizon but as a membrane between different states of being, a place where conventional physics dissolves and limitless potential begins. Each brushstroke in Orlik’s “excitations” hints at the unseen energy that physicists call the zero-point field, the restless activity beneath empty space. Rather than filling every surface like the horror vacui of traditional decorative arts, Orlik celebrates emptiness, using strokes that do not fill space but rather reveal the energy contained within it.

Below this ethereal boundary lies a transformed realm where coral, terracotta, and dusty pink dunes are broken by flashes of cerulean that suggest pools and streams. This lower terrain reveals Earth’s capacity to create life-supporting conditions through natural processes. The contrast with the still, flawless upper realm is deliberate: above is pure, crystalline beauty; below is the rich, living complexity of biological existence.

Water appears only in a few scattered pools, yet these flashes of blue draw the eye because they hint at life where the upper regions remain barren. In Daoist philosophy, water symbolises the highest virtue: gentle yet ultimately unstoppable, overcoming obstacles through persistence rather than force. The presence of water in Orlik’s fertile lower dunes signifies more than biological abundance; they embody a quiet wisdom that true strength comes from openness and adaptability rather than force.

The painting’s spatial complexity follows principles first outlined by the nineteenth-century mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky, whose nonEuclidean geometries uncovered worlds where parallel lines diverge and triangles’ angles sum to less than 180 degrees. While M.C. Escher explored similar forms, Orlik uses these curved non-Euclidian ideas to create visual spaces that reflect how the mind actually works: non-linear, recursive, and resistant to traditional mapping. This mathematical complexity echoes Einstein’s field equations, which describe gravity as the curvature of spacetime itself. Similarly, Orlik suggests that consciousness shapes experience, creating gravitational fields of attention and memory. The painting thus acts as a topographical map of awareness, charting areas where psychological weight forms perceptual hills and valleys.

Orlik’s work contrasts sharply with the American landscape tradition. Unlike Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow (1836, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), depicting the American landscape from a divine viewpoint, portraying humans as nature’s caretaker. Orlik’s, contrasting perspective removes this hierarchy, suggesting the landscape requires no human stewardship as consciousness is already an integral part of it. This viewpoint also differs notably from Georgia O’Keeffe’s explorations. While O’Keeffe captured the character of specific places through keen observation and emotional engagement, Orlik’s mainly conceptual approach, depicts the psychological space that California evoked within him, showing not the location itself, but the consciousness that the place inspired.

James Turrell’s Roden Crater project (1977–present) similarly reshapes perception through architectural interventions, creating viewing chambers that turn the sky into a tangible presence. Orlik achieves comparable effects purely through painterly techniques, proving traditional media’s ability to access consciousness-expanding realms usually associated with large-scale environmental art.

The chromatic relationships depict a union of opposites. The sterile greys and silvers above symbolise Jung’s “spiritual principle” detached and focused on eternal patterns while the warm earth tones below embody the “material principle”, nurturing and lifegenerating. The central band acts as an alchemical vessel where opposing forces meet and transform each other. The colour choices also reflect broader cultural tensions of the early 1980s. The grey, lunar landscape exemplifies the technological awe of the Space Age and humanity’s new godlike perspective from orbit. The fertile lower terrain signifies the growing ecological awareness, and the recognition that Earth’s life-support systems need careful stewardship, not technological dominance.

The paintings environmental focus also connects with the literary movement that would later become “New Nature Writing”, a movement that blurred the line between human culture and natural processes. Writers like Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)) and Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams (1986)) developed prose techniques that integrate human consciousness within larger ecological considerations. Orlik achieves a similar effect visually, proving that the boundaries between observer and observed, culture and nature, are far more fluid than traditionally thought. Contemporary viewers regard Parting Dunes as a work that predicts advances in consciousness studies, environmental science, and digital culture. In an age of virtual reality, which challenges traditional ideas of presence and place, Orlik’s painting offers a conceptual framework for understanding how consciousness can inhabit multiple spatial realities simultaneously.

Like Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which shows that observation changes what is seen, the painting implies that consciousness and reality shape each other. Its unresolved perspectives mirror broader philosophical shifts away from modernist certainties towards more flexible, contextual understandings. The embedded human forms gain further significance through Jung’s concept of “participation mystique”: a primitive psychological state in which the subject and object merge into a single, unified experience.

The title Parting Dunes refers to the traditional boundaries between self and world, perception and reality, memory and experience. As viewers navigate the curved geometries Orlik presents, they discover that the most direct paths to understanding often require abandoning the straight lines of rational analysis in favour of winding paths that connect heart and mind, and imagination and individual awareness. Parting Dunes captures the moment when one artist’s encounter with Californian mountains becomes a vision of human awareness embedded within a living landscape of an intelligent universe. In our increasingly disconnected world, the painting offers both insight and hope: a consciousness that flows like water, adapts like life, and endures like stone, while remaining receptive to the transformative power of beauty.

30.

Self Portrait with Red Sun, 1980-1984 Pencil and coloured crayon

26.5 x 23cm.; 10½ x 9in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

THE INDELIBLE MARK OF HENRY ORLIK

By Gerald Dowden

The two self-portraits of Henry Orlik, Self Portrait with a Red Sun and Self Portrait, which feature in this exhibition, are stunning. Both depict a head, both comprising the same model, all in some degree of turbulence; doleful, frenzied, playful, in turn, and much more of course. The turbulence appears to be both internal and external, with a clutter of carved blocks, of various shapes, making up the head, and several gaseous streams around the head, giving a sense of unsettling motion.

On closer inspection you can see that the blocks, the same form and structure in each head, reminiscent of children’s playing bricks but far more sophisticated in shape, are all unique; no one shape is reproduced in the same portrait. Key features can be identified in each picture, the distinctive cross-latticed window-eye, the little lozenge widow-eye, and the distinctive nose carved like the number 2 with its arrow-like tail.

Similarly, the environment in which the heads exist in each picture is also turbulent. The sky behind the heads is streaked with twisted contrails, which appear to come together in a great swirl around the left side of the face, entering the mouth and then exiting from a gap in the throat, like ectoplasm escaping through a tracheotomy. Almost in contrast, the sun gives off beams, moving away from the head. Perhaps the turbulence is caused by these two forces colliding and twisting the head. The heads look troubled and yet there is also something of a comic-like quality to them.

The medium used in each picture has, to a great extent, affected the method of composition and, by extension, shaped the tone of the picture. In Cyclops, a version in acrylics, the entire surface is covered with hundreds of short squiggles of different colour, individual brush strokes, both on top of the subject and below, creating an impression of bustling energy, everywhere. Acrylic allows the kind of translucence which comes from this application. In the Self Portrait, a picture in pastels, the colour has mainly been applied with pastel shading, cross-hatching and some squiggling. This method, combined with the distinctive colouring of pastel, has created the lightest feel of all three pictures, perhaps the happiest. Finally, in Self Portrait with a Red Sun, Orlik has achieved the greatest clarity of image with the simplest of materials, pencil. Again, the entire surface is covered with a variety of shading, cross-hatching, different thickness of drawn lines, straight and sinuous.

The amount of fundamental manual work involved in Orlik’s methodology is awesome. And that is the platform for the most fabulous and exquisite imagery.

Orlik has emphasised the emotional importance of his methodology in a number of ways, over the years. In the Obelisk Gallery catalogue of his work, 1978, he wrote:

‘The pictures are painted with small uninhibited marks of colour. With these I build the images. It is very important that the technique is examined closely, in detail. And that it is looked on as abstract expression itself.

I feel that my painting is close to music, in that the composition of symbols is the subject matter (The Message), or a musical composition on a certain theme. But by painting the subject with uninhibited, moving marks of colour, I try to express in an abstract way the feelings connected with the particular subject. Just like a musician gives a performance of a particular musical composition.’

In a further explanation of his method, written in 1985, Orlik again emphasises movement and feeling:

‘This is a method which is a synthesis of the concrete and the abstract. This method of “brush motion” is the abstract emotional key the concrete quintessential forms of the subject matter. The “living line” is a technique of movement or animation. The untrammelled line expressing emotion and impulse.’

Later, Orlik would employ the term excitations to describe this method.

In The Parting, acrylic, the method has resulted in a softer image, common to many of the earlier pictures. It is dreamlike, as if gossamer has been drawn across the surface. When I first saw this picture, I was so impressed that I wrote a text which I left at the gallery for Orlik. I specifically referred to, ‘… the convoluted tresses of faded gold … the perfect embodiment … in the hair’s arrangement, suspended and twisted as it is between the two surfaces…’, comparing it with similar treatment of hair in paintings by Remedios Varo (one of the great Surrealist women artists). In terms of the method, I highlighted, ‘… the meticulous, calligraphic care apparent in the tracing of so many looped filaments across the canvas.’ I concluded: ‘At no stage does it [the method] obscure the lyrical message; on the contrary, it serves to situate the emotional climate in which that message is to be communicated.’

My first viewing of The Parting, along with other works by Orlik, was quite by chance, when I visited the Polish Centre in Hammersmith, in November 1978, to see what its

gallery had on show. Until that moment I had not even heard of Henry Orlik. As stated above, I was really moved by his pictures and left him a note, of a few paragraphs, describing my enjoyment, from which the extracts above are taken. To my surprise and excitement, Orlik wrote to me, thanking me for the ‘letter’ and inviting me to visit him at his studio. “I shall be going away for a week at Christmas and will be moving altogether in late February.” I only managed to visit him a few times, in the first few weeks of 1979 as, true to his word, he left the country; from what he told me he was being offered studio space by Mrs James Coburn in California (as a 23 year-old, I was very impressed by that!).

We had a number of interesting conversations in his studio, a large basement room (which I then assumed to be a bedsit) in South Kensington. Surrounded by his canvases, Orlik complained about the galleries and their commercial greed. The one specific conversation I remember, however, led to a misunderstanding, which I now associate with the turbulence in the self-portrait pictures. We had a discussion, on one visit, in which the word ‘Caucasian’ came up, but when I next visited Orlik he denied, quite vehemently, ever having used this term; for my part, I knew we had, as I had gone home on that occasion reflecting on ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’ by Bertolt Brecht, and how little I knew about the playwright. But Orlik was adamant. Knowing more about Orlik’s history now, perhaps we had stumbled on uncomfortable memories for him.

It was only later, after Orlik had left the country, that I discovered he had exhibited at the Acoris Art Centre (1972 and 1974), alongside Surrealist greats such as Ernst and Magritte, so my comparison with Remedios Varo was not so amiss.

Over the years, I looked out for Henry Orlik and his work, to no avail. With the coming of the internet, there was greater access to information, but still nothing. For 46 years! Then in 2025, I discover that Orlik and his work had resurfaced, fortuitously, but as result of personal misfortune for Orlik himself.

These two pictures, The Parting and Self-Portrait with a Red Sun, situate my two encounters with Henry Orlik. Between 1979 and 2025, from my perspective, Henry Orlik disappeared, so the title of The Parting, the first picture I was moved by, and my fascination with it, was almost premonitional. When Orlik resurfaced (earlier this year, for me) I saw and was drawn to his Self-Portrait with a Red Sun, and I’m now privileged be able to enjoy that picture, Orlik’s portrait of himself, on my walls.

Orlik wrote in that letter to me in 1979: ‘At the close of the exhibition, I was handed your letter. I thank you for your criticism and very flattering observations. You seem to understand and elucidate on the pictures more than anyone I have spoken to’.

I, in turn, am flattered to have been asked to write this piece and repay my enjoyment of Henry Orlik’s work.

31. Self Portrait, 1980-1984

With artist’s stamp lower right Coloured crayons and pencil

42.5 x 34cm.; 16¾ x 13½in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited London, Winsor Birch at the Maas Gallery, Cosmos of Dreams, 9-20 August 2024

Henry Orlik’s Self Portrait holds a unique place within the artist’s methodical process: that crucial stage where internal vision first appears in a visible form. This is a deeply personal and psychological subject. While this drawing serves as preparation for the larger acrylic tour de force Cyclops: Self Portrait, measuring 171 x 133 cm (Private collection, USA), it accomplishes something that the monumental canvases cannot, preserving thought in its early stages, captured through the direct intimacy and texture of crayon meeting paper.

The composition features blocks of circular drum shapes, triangles, rectangles, and squares that collectively evoke the complex and intricate neurons that underpin brain functions. However, this scientific precision serves a greater purpose. For an artist born into the aftermath of European displacement, with his Polish father serving with Allied forces and his Belarusian mother surviving Nazi labour camps, the cellular approach to self-representation reflects a hard-earned understanding of how identity rebuilds itself from fragments.

The treatment of the eyes shows remarkable sophistication. One appears traditionally painted, with a white background and a central black pupil, preserving external reality. Its companion, however, becomes an opening, functioning as an eye to the soul and a portal into the mind. This deliberate asymmetry reflects refugee experience, where survival demanded attention to immediate threats alongside deeper currents of meaning.

The spirals emerging from the back of the head to suggest hair or perhaps thoughts establish a link with Orlik’s painted works while maintaining the experimental immediacy of preparatory study. These organic elements introduce a sense of temporal flow into an otherwise geometric structure, illustrating how rational subject accommodates unconscious processes. They foreshadow his mature technique without the systematic elaboration required by larger canvases.

The mysterious black void within the cross-shaped framework functions as a psychological anchor and an impenetrable core of the mind, drawing the viewer in. This central darkness has gravitational qualities that attract surrounding forms towards it. The spatial relationships mirror Einstein’s concept of mass warping spacetime: here, the accumulated memory and unconscious material create curvature in the geometry of self-representation.

The winding road that leads into the neck through a small tunnel, with smoke emerging from its mouth, transforms the portrait from an external likeness into an internal landscape. This pneumatic pathway, connecting thought to expression through breath, establishes the fundamental relationship between consciousness and creative output. For Orlik, whose systematic progression spans multiple media, each stage represents a distinct form of creative expression.

The colour uses experimental restraint. Muted lime greens, rose pinks, ochres, and blues create harmonies that feel both complete and tentative. These tones have the quality of memory filtered through protective layers, not the raw primaries of immediate experience but colours processed through time and psychological need. The waxy crayon medium enhances this effect, producing surfaces that seem to emit light from within.

This chapter of the subject captures vital aspects of artistic thinking that finished works often obscure. The directness of crayon application, waxy pigment responding to manual pressure, fosters a physical intimacy between artist and surface that cannot be recreated mechanically. Like marginal notes in medieval manuscripts, preparatory works often possess immediacy that central imagery sacrifices for completeness.

The work’s intimate scale calls for close engagement, creating viewing conditions that mirror the introspective process depicted. Unlike paintings meant for public spaces, this drawing requires a personal encounter. The relationship that emerges reflects the psychological dynamics within the composition: genuine engagement involves accepting vulnerability while respecting boundaries that are deliberately opaque.

Orlik’s inclusion in exhibitions alongside masterpieces by René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Yves Tanguy during the early 1970s established his Surrealist credentials; yet, his subsequent withdrawal from the commercial art world allowed for the development of a more personal visual vocabulary. This self-portrait emerges from that period of artistic independence, where external validation yields to internal necessity. His methodical progression from foundational works in pencil and colour crayons to monumental canvases reflects philosophical investigation rather than market calculation.

The technical economy here demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of medium-specific possibilities. While large-scale acrylics use thousands of spiral marks to suggest molecular activity, these broader crayon strokes create atmospheric effects through colour interaction and textural variation. The restraint works effectively: concentrated intensity often reveals more than elaborate complexity.

The biographical details deserve attention. As an only child whose family experienced multiple displacements, from wartime Germany through English resettlement camps to eventually settling in Swindon, Orlik developed a sharp sensitivity to how consciousness creates a coherent sense of self from broken pieces. The geometric division of facial features reflects this refugee journey: familiar components rearranged to suit new circumstances.

Contemporary neuroscience indicates that consciousness arises from the integration of many simple processes, much like how this portrait builds psychological complexity from basic geometric relationships. Orlik’s achievement is in making this understanding visible through purely artistic means, creating forms that evoke both thought, psychological depth, and emotional landscapes as expressions of unified dynamics.

Orlik’s process of self-reflection, evident in this drawing, reflects his broader understanding of artistic practice. Each mark acts as both an aesthetic choice and a psychological exploration, revealing layers of experience that traditional portraiture cannot reach. The resulting image presents consciousness itself as an ongoing creative endeavour rather than a fixed core.

The four spirals extending from the cranial region link ancient symbolic traditions with modern psychological insights. Their organic curves introduce memory and anticipation into current awareness, illustrating how the past and the future continuously influence immediate experience. These elements develop into detailed symbolic systems in painted works, yet here they retain an experimental quality that demonstrates thinking in progress.

The methodical journey of Orlik’s creative process, from tracing paper to pencil sketches, colour crayon studies, watercolour explorations, and finally to acrylics, shows a strong dedication to understanding how different media reveal various aspects of the same vision. This self-portrait captures the moment when the concept first becomes visible, preserving the spontaneity that later stages often sacrifice for completeness.

Orlik defines consciousness as a domain that requires both scientific precision and artistic intuition, along with geometric logic and organic flow. Self Portrait shows that even initial investigations can yield profound insights when undertaken with enough focus and genuine interest in the core mysteries of human awareness. By capturing the moment of visual thinking taking shape, it offers insights into the creative process that finished paintings cannot reveal.

32.

Return Backwards

Signed lower left

Watercolour

70 x 52cm.; 27½ x 20½in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

In this radiant watercolour Return Backwards, Henry Orlik reveals the early vision for the haunting acrylic painting that would follow. Working in the fluid medium of watercolour, the artist explores spatial relationships and colour harmonies with an immediacy that the final acrylic work would later consolidate into more definitive statements.

The watercolour reveals Orlik’s fascination with light as both revelation and concealment. The translucent washes create atmospheric depth while maintaining the medium’s characteristic luminosity. The coral and salmon tones that dominate the composition suggest flesh and dawn, imbuing the chamber with organic warmth that contrasts sharply with the geometric precision. This tension between the corporeal and the constructed becomes central to understanding Orlik’s broader artistic concerns.

The curved walls, in delicate gradations of warm earth tones, showcase the artist’s sophisticated understanding of watercolour’s capacity for subtle tonal transitions. Unlike the more assertive presence these elements would assume in the final acrylic, here they emerge gradually from the paper’s surface, with boundaries that are soft and permeable. This quality heightens the sense of spatial ambiguity that characterises the work, suggesting that the chamber itself exists in a state of flux rather than a fixed reality.

The stained-glass window, with jewel-like clarity against the warmer surrounding colours, serves as both a light source and a symbolic anchor. The watercolour technique enables Orlik to effectively capture the character of transmitted light, as the transparent pigments naturally evoke the translucent qualities of coloured glass. This technical affinity between medium and subject suggests why watercolour was an ideal choice for exploring these initial compositional ideas.

The blue-draped figure emerges from or recedes into the cylindrical sarcophagus with even greater ambiguity than in the finished work. The watercolour’s fluid boundaries make the figure’s relationship to its container more permeable, implying metamorphosis rather than simple movement. This quality demonstrates the medium’s capacity to capture states of transition and becoming, making it particularly suited to Orlik’s exploration of temporal and spatial liminality.

The cosmic aperture above, in deep purples and blues, showcases this work’s atmospheric effects. The pigments appear to diffuse into the paper’s fibres, creating a sense of infinite depth that would be achieved differently in the final acrylic. This technical approach emphasises the opening’s role as a portal between finite interior space and cosmic infinity.

This complete and finished watercolour on paper shows Orlik’s process of visual discovery, where early instincts about space, light, and meaning gradually develop into the more psychologically complex statements of his finished paintings. It functions as both preparation and achievement, capturing a moment of artistic growth that sheds light on the deeper structures of creative vision.

33.

Return Backwards

With artist’s stamp verso

Acrylic on canvas

70.5 x 53cm.; 28 x 21in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

London, Winsor Birch at the Maas Gallery, Cosmos of Dreams, 9-20 August 2024

Orlik himself described Return Backwards as “vampiric” and “very gothic,” admitting that it continued to disturb even its creator. At its heart lies a profound meditation on existence as a state of perpetual uncertainty, where the sacred and profane converge without resolution.

At first glance the composition evokes an Annunciation scene, yet this resemblance swiftly unravels into unease. A sarcophagus, its lid ajar, anchors the scene. From it, a blue-draped figure seems to emerge or retreat, its suspended movement posing the riddle, as Orlik posed, “Has she come out, or is she going back in?” This question of directionality and temporal confusion defines the work’s unsettling power.

Unlike Fra Angelico’s serene Annunciation (c. 1438–1447, Museo di San Marco, Florence), where divine encounter unfolds within stable architectural space, Orlik’s chamber is spatially impossible. Curved apse-like walls recall the Byzantine mosaics of San Vitale, Ravenna (c. 547 CE), yet here geometry collapses into hyperbolic perspectives. Giotto’s Padua frescoes (c. 1305) had once established psychological depth through rational architecture; Orlik instead creates a world where causality falters and comprehension fractures.

The stained-glass windows derive from memories of Fairford camp, where Orlik lived as a child among displaced Polish families between 1951 and 1958. Originally built for the American Air Force, the camp’s glass produced what he remembered as “amazing reflections and shadows on the floor.” These impressions integrate with the celebrated medieval windows of Fairford Church, England’s most complete collection of pre-Reformation-stained glass, themselves survivors of Civil War destruction. That such fragile images endured political violence while comforting refugee children issues Orlik’s painting with a layered irony and poignancy. Sacredness here is born not from doctrine but from lived experiences of protection and vulnerability. This personal vision contrasts sharply with works grounded in theological orthodoxy, such as Stanley Spencer’s The Resurrection, Cookham (1924–27, Tate Britain) or Eric Gill’s Stations of the Cross (1918, Westminster Cathedral). Orlik instead fuses memory with ambiguity, making the sacred a deeply psychological experience.

Every object within the chamber further destabilises certainty. A clock reads five minutes to twelve, prompting questions of day or night, life or death. Its multiplied pendulums, Orlik suggested, “distort reality.” Where Salvador Dalí’s Persistence of Memory (1931, MoMA, New York) depicted time as fluid, Orlik posits time as traumatically plural, demanding simultaneous frameworks.

Opposite, a falcon hovers in predatory suspension. Christian tradition often represents the Holy Spirit as a dove, seen in Simone Martini’s Annunciation (1333, Uffizi, Florence), yet Orlik substitutes a raptor, embodying annunciation and threat at once. This fierce presence recalls the terrifying seraphim of Isaiah or Ezekiel’s visionary beasts, affirming that divine encounters often overwhelm human comprehension.

The sarcophagus rests on a recessed platform reminiscent of early baptisteries, such as Ravenna’s Orthodox Baptistery (c. 450–460 CE), which signified ritual rebirth. Orlik, however, renders this descent gothic, a psychological plunge rather than a sacramental passage. Equally menacing is the pyramidal void that pierces the left wall: a geometric intrusion into childhood space, recalling Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical scenes where ordinary forms trigger unease. Nearby, a hook-like object casts tangled shadows across the curved wall, a device akin to Holbein’s anamorphic skull in The Ambassadors (1533, National Gallery, London), infusing memento mori into the scene.

The ceiling aperture intensifies this sense of dislocation. Opening onto a violet cosmos, it becomes a mirror to infinity, echoing both the Pantheon’s oculus (126 CE, Rome) and cosmic birth imagery in the Très Riches Heures (c. 1413–16, Musée Condé, Chantilly). In Christian symbolism purple signifies Advent’s anticipation and Good Friday’s mourning: dualities that permeate Orlik’s palette.

Coral and salmon hues suggest flesh, birth, and dawn; purple evokes cosmic mystery and liturgical sorrow; cool blues recall Marian iconography, as in Rogier van der Weyden’s Annunciation (c. 1434, Louvre, Paris). Orlik’s colour scheme echoes the medieval symbolism of manuscripts such as the Book of Kells (c. 800 CE), where purple denoted majesty, blue heavenly truth, and gold divine light, yet here these codes acquire a contemporary psychological urgency.

The chamber’s impossible space resonates with M.C. Escher’s explorations of non-Euclidean geometry, especially Circle Limit IV (1960, M.C. Escher Foundation). Where Escher’s geometry remained mathematical, Orlik’s becomes theological, conjuring a setting where logic collapses. In this he approaches the gothic ambiguity of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490–1510, Museo del Prado), or the existential solitude of Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1808–10, Alte National Galerie, Berlin). His central question, “Is this a good or bad place, and do you want to go somewhere else?” resists resolution, maintaining uncertainty as the essence of meaning.

Return Backwards does not provide religious consolation or rational clarity. Instead, it insists that contradiction and uncertainty constitute the fabric of lived experience. The painting’s disturbing beauty arises from refusal to simplify; it embodies trauma as a permanent condition rather than a solvable dilemma. Here sacred space is not a site of gentle visitation but of urgent warning, haunted by displacement and upheaval. Like the refugee condition itself, Return Backwards inhabits an in-between state, reflecting an impossible desire to travel back and recover what history destroyed. Orlik, the child of parents who survived Nazi occupation and Soviet oppression, inherited a legacy of survival and dispossession. The painting materialises this inheritance into visual form.

In this chamber, where all temporal moments converge, redemption remains uncertain; yet the very act of confronting paradox illuminates both ancient narratives and modern anxieties about causation, suffering, and the possibility, however fragile, of transformation.

34.

Beverly Hills

With artist’s stamp verso

Acrylic on canvas

73.5 x 56cm.; 29 x 22in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Exhibited

London, Winsor Birch at the Maas Gallery, Cosmos of Dreams, 9-20 August 2024

Henry Orlik’s Beverly Hills is an exploration of memory, where traditional boundaries between observer and observed dissolve into something far more intricate. Painted after the artist’s residence in California, the work serves as both documentary evidence and profound reflection on cultural displacement, commenting on American privilege through the penetrating gaze of the eternal outsider.

The painting depicts the interior of a distinctive Beverly Hills home, a space Orlik was invited to visit in 1980 by Beverly Coburn, ex-wife of actor James Coburn. Working from memory over six to eight months, Orlik employed his signature “excitations”: thousands of tiny, spiralled brushstrokes inspired by his reading of quantum physics, producing surfaces that pulse with life. Each mark responds with what he termed “the sensitivity of a lie detector,” capturing the psychological atmosphere of remembered experiences.

At the composition’s heart, a jade-coloured staircase descends through an archway flanked by conical forms. Unlike Andrea Palladio’s Villa Rotonda (1566–1571, Vicenza), which guides the eye upwards toward an architectural climax, Orlik’s passage demands descent into psychological depths. His revelation that “under the staircase there is a walkway underneath” transforms the architectural feature into metaphor for excavating buried layers of consciousness: “this is real life. I spent my life.”

Flanking the descent, organic guardian forms evoke the curvature of Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure (1951, Festival of Britain). While Moore celebrated natural form through reduction, Orlik’s pillars contain and channel movement between states of awareness. Their surfaces, animated through the excitation technique, suggest matter in constant molecular agitation, where space itself responds to observation. Each microscopic mark transforms the painting into a field of continual perceptual activity, rendering consciousness visible through pigment.

Dominating the composition’s centre, a table draped in luxurious red cloth supports what Orlik describes as “a living hand, like a dispossessed hand” that “feels it’s in charge or it is in charge.” This becomes the artist’s masterstroke of social observation, expressed with his characteristic wit: “on the other hand, it’s just bananas.” The scarlet drapery, cascading like velvet in La Scala or the Bolshoi, transforms domestic furniture into a stage, embodying Beverly Hills’s enduring sense of entitlement. The chromatic arrangement demonstrates Orlik’s nuanced understanding of colour’s psychological impact: dominant earth tones suggest warmth, whilst vivid blues and greens introduce tension that prevents visual repose. The emerald staircase provides vital punctuation,

hinting at both natural growth and artifice; green, historically a symbol of paradise in Byzantine mosaics, is destabilised in this context, emphasising the constructed nature of luxury.

Suspended from the ceiling, a spherical fixture replicates an authentic Alexander Calder mobile from the Coburn residence. While Calder’s kinetic sculptures, such as The Big Red (1959, Whitney Museum, New York), dance with air currents, here the mobile remains frozen.

The immobile sculpture exemplifies Beverly Hills’ temporal ambiguity, echoing the protective isolation Orlik observed: “lots of places with fences,” where residents focus on “protecting themselves, staying private.”

The large window functions both as an architectural feature and cognitive frame that, in Orlik’s words, feels “like a real film” yet remains fundamentally “about memories rather than anything lived.” This distinction proves vital for understanding the work’s psychological significance. The distant Californian mountains embody perpetual displacement: observed but never fully possessed, natural grandeur appreciated from behind protective barriers. For Orlik, a refugee of Nazi-occupied Europe this mediated view recalls a lifelong experience of existing behind fences, forever observing yet never fully belonging.

The geometric precision of the window contrasts with the organic interior, reflecting Beverly Hills’ fundamental disconnect between appearance and reality. Like The Truman Show (1998) which Orlik recalled in conversation, it anticipates environments where simulation masquerades as authenticity.

Orlik’s excitation technique, akin to Paul Cézanne’s repeated observations in Mont Sainte-Victoire (1904–1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art), produces surfaces pulsating with psychological life. However, whilst Cézanne sought objective truth, Orlik captures subjective responses, transforming spatial distortions into reflections of cultural dislocation. Horror vacui, seen in Islamic art, Victorian interiors, and Aboriginal dot paintings, appears here not from spiritual anxiety but from the unease of cultural dislocation. Every surface vibrates with activity, suggesting that calm might invite unwelcome awareness; the staircase implies motion, yet Calder’s mobile remains balanced, the table prepared yet unoccupied. The work also explores questions of reality and representation, resonating with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945). The window metaphorically examines mediated experience, where natural beauty exists only as backdrop for human performance.

Orlik’s interior becomes a psychological self-portrait: the descending staircase mirrors his immersion into American culture, the suspended mobile his navigation between multiple cultural coordinates: German birth, Polish-Belarusian heritage, English upbringing, and American sojourn. The “living hand” staged theatrically embodies every immigrant’s negotiation with authority and legitimacy, while its reduction to “just bananas” underscores the absurdity of cultural superiority. The protected interior, beautiful yet artificial, mirrors Orlik’s lifelong experience of safety within limitation.

Unlike Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York), where melting clocks suggest impossible time, or Giorgio de Chirico’s The Enigma of the Hour (1911, private collection), where classical architecture exists in dreamlike isolation, Orlik intensifies rather than contradicts reality. All elements are plausible: staircases descend through doorways, lights hang from ceilings, tables occupy central positions, yet their combination produces psychological effects transcending function. Using excitation and artistic memory, Orlik exposes the illusions of privilege, turning a celebrity’s interior into an elaborate study of perception. This domestic scene becomes a portal through which everyday reality uncovers hidden truths, proving that the most profound discoveries often emerge from close attention to the ordinary, which under the refugee artist’s penetrating gaze, is revealed as a carefully staged performance disguised as natural order.

ENCRYPTED AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THE IMPORTANT WORD PAINTINGS

By Grant Ford

“The average citizen of the West has no idea that a painter in a garret, a little-known magician, or a writer of “unintelligible” verse is a magician who shapes all those things in life which he prizes.”

– Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind

Henry Orlik’s word paintings, created between 2010 and 2022, exemplify work born from crisis and reshaped into a deeply personal approach. These quantum surrealist pieces, mostly on rag paper, emerge in his later years, marginalised by the art world and facing personal adversity, when he abandoned his earlier figurative style to forge something entirely new. What Nietzsche called the strengthening force of survival pulses through every piece: pain transformed into vision, which in turn becomes a systematic method for making the invisible visible.

The prescience that characterised Orlik’s earlier works, such as the iconic Fighting Skyscrapers, NYC (1982), reaches its peak here. These word paintings emerge as quantum science transforms civilisation, from computing to communications, a synchronicity confirmed by the United Nations’ designation of 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. For Orlik, quantum physics was never merely scientific but profoundly metaphorical: a model for rendering thought itself visible.

At first glance, the works seem chaotic, with calligraphic marks that nearly become illegible. However, this perceived disorder is deliberate. The lineage traces from Kandinsky’s synaesthetic notations through Klee, Tobey’s “white writing”, Michaux’s quasi-linguistic gestures, and Twombly’s scriptural markmaking to the embodied thought of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. Orlik’s synthesis is distinctive: text embedded within painterly gesture, requiring archaeological decipherment. Viewers need to orient themselves, excavate meaning, and reintroduce time to fully appreciate these works. Declarations such as “I HAVE GIVEN PAINTING A VOICE” act both as critique and instruction, challenging contemporary superficiality while affirming art as a process of self-discovery.

“They told me that the night and day were all that I could see; They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up, And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle, And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning.”

– William Blake

35. Melville Close, 2015

Word painting, Collage, acrylic and pencil on rag paper

70 x 103cm.; 27½ x 40½in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

In the upper reaches of Henry Orlik’s Melville Close (2015), a phrase emerges from the swirling marks: “THIS IS A CRIMINALISED SOCIETY YOU HAVE TO BE A CROOK TO RULE GOD BLESS THE QUEEN OF CROOKS.” The words curve and dance across the sheet with urgency, their calligraphic intensity matched only by the ferocity of their message. In collage and acrylic on rag paper, the work culminates Orlik’s quantum surrealist method, a synthesis of personal geography, social critique, and metaphysical inquiry. Unlike Christian Dotremont’s 1960s logograms which sought to make “poetry visible” through spontaneous gestures, Orlik’s approach is forensic, each mark evidence of consciousness under extreme pressure.

The painting’s title anchors it in Swindon’s urban landscape; Melville Close lies just streets from Dudley Road, Orlik’s childhood home to which he returned after decades of creative exile. This detail transforms the work into a psychogeographical map, where personal crisis meets social observation. The Queen referenced is not simply Elizabeth II but a symbol of institutional power, which Orlik views as fundamentally corrupt. His distinction between the “human” and the “subhuman”, central to his word paintings, is sharply articulated in this accusatory statement.

The colour palette highlights Orlik’s mastery of chromatic psychology. Dominant blues and greens suggest both natural growth and digital screens, while red and yellow punctuate the composition like warnings. This palette contrasts with the muted earth tones of his earlier surrealist canvases, reflecting the heightened emotional intensity of his later work.

Religious and sociological themes permeate the work without diminishing its aesthetic complexity. Orlik’s critique of institutionalised Christianity “USE CHURCH + CHARITY AS CAMOUFLAGE” positions him within a tradition of artistic dissent alongside Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War (1810-1820) and George Grosz’s satirical Weimar Germany drawings (1916–1922). Unlike these predecessors, Orlik’s critique makes the invisible visible, transforming thought itself into painterly substance.

The reference to “SWINDON, MELVILLE CLOSE, DUDLEY ROAD.” places the work within a specific English provincial context, linking it to broader concerns of post-industrial decline and social disenfranchisement. Once a prosperous railway town, Swindon has come to symbolise bureaucratic mediocrity and economic stagnation. Orlik’s decision to base his cosmic themes in this particular location demonstrates his belief that universal truths arise through specific interactions with place and time.

Melville Close’s meanings unfold slowly, requiring the temporal investment contemporary culture often resists. This aligns with Orlik’s critique of a society that values surface over depth, transaction over transformation. The work insists on being read as well as seen, creating a hybrid experience that challenges conventional distinctions between literary and visual art.

Orlik’s approach to political art, avoids both propaganda and pure aestheticism, creating a space where social critique and metaphysical speculation coexist productively. In an era of increasing surveillance and social control, his word paintings model artistic resistance that operates through intensity rather than ideology.

Melville Close is proof that authenticity remains possible even amid institutional betrayal. Its quantum methodology, emphasising how consciousness can shape material reality, opens pathways to forms of human agency beyond conventional political analysis. It is simultaneously a refugee’s lament and a prophet’s warning, honouring both the particularities of displacement and the universalities of human dignity under siege.

The painting’s profound impact lies in its double revelation: Orlik both conceals and exposes himself, deliberately making the words nearly illegible to protect his vulnerabilities, yet hoping they will be read, a plea for the understanding society has consistently denied him. The careful illegibility of his script acts as emotional protection, while its persistent presence represents hope that someone might have the patience to decipher his message.

This is a visual language capable of immense philosophical and emotional weight while remaining an object of devastating beauty. Melville Close succeeds because it refuses to choose between the local geography of exile and the cosmic implications of consciousness under assault. It is, in the fullest sense, a quantum artwork, existing simultaneously as autobiography and prophecy, grief and transcendence, revealing different aspects of its heartbreaking truth depending on how deeply we allow ourselves to look.

36.

Grenfell

Inscribed with writings and symbols.

Watercolour and pencil

75 x 58cm.; 29½ x 23in.

Provenance

Private UK Collection

Henry Orlik’s Grenfell serves as a powerful critique of the moral decline in British society. Created during the artist’s final creative phase before a stroke ended his ability to paint and write, it encapsulates decades of artistic growth into a direct, candid statement. The delicate medium belies its force; seventy-two lives lost to institutional neglect speak through Orlik’s combination of image, text, beauty, and condemnation.

The composition features a rose-tinted, anthropomorphic tower rising with desperate grace, its organic form suggesting ambition and human fragility. Reminiscent of Gothic cathedrals, it leads not to divine revelation but to a swirling mass of charcoal and graphite dominating the scene. These turbulent forms, developed over fifty years of practice, evoke smoke, flames, and the collective soul of a tragedy exposing Britain’s deepest inequalities. While the darkness recalls Goya’s Disasters of War (1810-1820, Museo del Prado, Madrid), where Goya depicted external conflict, Orlik charts internal moral collapse.

The inscribed texts flanking the central tower act as a chorus of condemnation. On the left, “THE CHURCH PRETENDING TO BELIEVE IN 72 WHO BELIEVED HER” criticises religious institutions for performative grief while upholding the structural inequalities that enabled Grenfell. The calligraphic precision of each letter reflects the meticulous effort needed to bear witness when official channels fail; every mark becomes a testament against institutional amnesia.

The right-hand inscription, “THE QUEEN WITH A GOLDEN CROWN ON HER HEAD FRYING,” presents the work’s most incendiary image. Orlik draws on the grotesque tradition of James Gillray’s satirical prints, transforming monarchy into a figure of culpable indifference. The verb “frying” operates on multiple levels: the literal burning of Grenfell’s residents, the metaphorical cooking of truth in official inquiries, and the colloquial sense of psychological breakdown under scrutiny. This linguistic richness mirrors the semantic layering of his visual technique, the “excitations” that have defined his practice since the late 1960s. Orlik’s use of colour theory showcases psychological complexity and a deliberate subversion of conventional associations. The dominant rose tone, traditionally linked with innocence, health, and optimism, becomes poisonous when applied to a structure housing the vulnerable. Gentle green accents, usually suggesting renewal, appear here as sickly emissions rather than life-affirming growth. This chromatic distortion reflects how essential human needs are corrupted by systems prioritising profit over people. The technique echoes Philip Guston’s The Studio (1969, Private Collection), where cartoon-like imagery masks profound cultural anxiety; yet Orlik’s palette gains further resonance through flesh-toned tints, hinting at the bodily reality of those who suffered.

Orlik’s creation of this work as a “word painting” places it within the tradition of text-based art that gained prominence in the 1960s with conceptual artists like Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari. His approach differs markedly from the cool irony of Pop art or the 1980s appropriation critique. The hand-drawn text suggests urgent, prophetic scrawls, recalling William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts, where word and image unite. Like Blake’s Jerusalem (1804-1820, Yale Center for British Art, Yale), Orlik depicts contemporary Britain as a fallen paradise, where protectors have become predators.

The work’s title resonates beyond its immediate reference to the tower block. Grenfell evokes “green fell”, Britain’s lush pastoral ideal, now tainted by urban neglect and social division. The name also echoes Beowulf’s monster-haunted landscape, where civilisation faces destructive forces, though in Orlik’s vision, the monsters wear crowns and clerical collars rather than rising from ancient bogs.

For an artist who exhibited alongside Salvador Dalí and René Magritte in the 1970s before withdrawing from the commercial art world, Grenfell embodies both culmination and departure. His early Surrealist and Quantum works explored dreams and unconscious desire; here, he maps social nightmares with equal precision, marking a shift from postmodern playfulness to urgent engagement with societal crises.

This is artwork, evidence, beauty, and documentation. In this, it shares DNA with the most powerful political art of recent decades: Steve McQueen’s Grenfell Tower film (2017, Tate and London Museum) and Leon Golub’s Interrogation II (1981, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago), where beauty serves to make unbearable truths palatable. Yet Orlik avoids the clinical distance of conceptual art for something more visceral and immediate.

Orlik’s “quantum word paintings” uncover the complex theoretical framework behind their seeming simplicity. Like particles in superposition, each phrase exists simultaneously as visual mark, semantic meaning, political accusation, and spiritual testimony.

“The Queen with a golden crown on her head frying” functions, literally, metaphorically, and prophetically, collapsing into personal interpretation through viewer engagement. This quantum indeterminacy reflects Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the more precisely we fix meaning, the more the work’s emotional resonance shifts.

The quantum metaphor raises questions of observation, reality, and responsibility. Like particles, properties emerge only through interaction. Grenfell gains significance through the viewer’s engagement by establishing fields of meaning that influence interpretation of the composition and our own position within systems of power and complicity.

The horror vacui, fear of empty space, that characterises much of Orlik’s work remains relevant here. The dense marks, symbols, and text suggest the complexity of modern life’s failures: housing policy, building regulations, corporate malfeasance, governmental negligence, and social inequality converge in a system where accountability becomes diffuse. The visual density mirrors this systemic opacity forcing viewers to work hard to decode the image as the investigators had to uncover the fire’s cause.

Within Orlik’s wider body of work, which often features floating figures, architecture, and apocalyptic landscapes, Grenfell is both culmination and a departure. Floating elements that once suggested dream logic now carry the weight of historical tragedy, referencing real buildings where people lived and died. This shift reflects contemporary art’s move from postmodern play toward urgent engagement with social crisis.

Grenfell succeeds by rejecting the comfort of distance. While official inquiries produce pages of measured analysis, Orlik offers a vision of moral reckoning that cannot be bureaucratised, sanitised, or archived. The work’s gentle beauty makes its accusations sharper, showing that the most effective protests often speak in whispers. Through formal innovation and ethical urgency, Orlik establishes a vital record of contemporary Britain and a reminder that art’s highest purpose may be to serve as society’s conscience.

Grenfell stands not only as a tribute to those who died but also as a warning to those who survive. The quantum fields Orlik visualises extend beyond the frame: we are entangled in deciding whose lives matter and whose are discarded. Smoke from one tower reaches us all, and failure to protect the vulnerable endangers everyone. Through watercolour and pencil, the simplest of media, Orlik proves that consciousness and matter form unified fields where observation, responsibility, and moral transformation remain inseparable.

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

By Sara Clemence

“…because he wanted, once, to understand his poor life.”

– Czeslaw Milsosz, ‘A Mirrored Gallery’

Henry struggles to walk and is semi-paralysed down his right side after his stroke in 2022 but his eyes are bright and light up when something resonates with him. He has a firm handshake and looks you directly in the eye. Conversations are intense, amusing, challenging and enigmatic. His mother, Lucyna, was Belarusian and his father, Jozef, Polish. Henry was brought up in England but until the age of fourteen he lived in Polish resettlement camps in Gloucestershire. He says he feels neither Polish, Russian nor English, that such a national identity is not important to him. However, he visited Belarus and Poland several times and is very interested in the culture and history of both places which reflects in his work. He speaks with a Polish accent, enjoys hyperbole and the absurd and has an old-world courtesy and dry wit. Dramatically, he describes the “torture” of discussing his paintings, and that he’s a “broken man” after a hearty discussion. Dostoevsky who “understands life” was an influence from his teenage years onwards – “he destroyed me” – and one senses his romantic enjoyment of the destruction. He is funny, sometimes downcast, sometimes dramatic; sometimes he seems very Russian with big emotions: he feels things greatly.

Henry talks of his life-long search to understand the world and himself through his art. His painting was his way of exploring himself; he noted in his diary that Dante in the Divine Comedy says, “to set something down is a way of understanding it” (9.8.18). From an early age, he was driven to paint and drawing came naturally to him. Things felt easier when he had a pencil in his hand and he was always drawing in the margins of his schoolbooks. It was “a need” and he “got hold of things by drawing them”. His school reports tell of his precocious talent. Things would come into Henry’s consciousness, and he would paint them; his private fantasies fed his paintings, and he trusted their energy because it “is genuine, beyond thought.” Henry believes that “The paintings taught me, and I was there to learn, I wasn’t there to preach.” He had to succumb to them, “there was nothing I could do about it.” Colour plays a big part in Henry’s exploration, and he believes it has a language of its own, that it “comes from within”, that “the colours tell you what to do.”Henry states that he did not know what he was searching for; he painted ideas exploring his infinite yearning to understand and to try

to make sense of a troubled twentieth century which was filled with paradox and contraries. He explores big philosophical ideas and his psychological, spiritual and sexual desire; the cosmos, the world, the evolution of matter and consciousness; society, freedom and free will, justice, truth and above all “reality”. He never turned away from the horrors of existence and believes that “truth should be beautiful”. “We have a road, we don’t know about it, but we must go along it; sometimes we take false turns.” He has a vision of an unseen world teeming with energy and attraction which materialised into his excitation brushstrokes. It is an entangled world full of correspondences. Henry was compelled to create ‘quantum painting’, but he had to “hammer at it” and it was “ridiculous” because he didn’t understand it.

In some of Henry’s paintings, in his excitations, one can feel his nerves, his anger at the world and the pressure of his precarious financial situation. It must have hurt for his art to be rejected again and again; a lesser man would have given up, but he was determined, and painting was a necessity for him. Some of his paintings display a tenderness and softness that it is possible to discern in him, even now, ravaged by time, a stroke and years of worry, poor eating and too much wine. But Henry’s life wasn’t always so, and he had some enjoyable times as a handsome, vigorous and charismatic young man who had “luck” at the beginning of his career. He would watch George Melly perform on a Sunday in Hyde Park, drank smuggled Russian champagne, visited Warsaw and “lived like a king”, spent time in Berlin and California and lived in New York for five years.

many sensual, sometimes erotic, paintings, but he holds his secrets close. He enjoys and respects rebels, “You have to be a rebel to go on maturing.” He wonders if he could have learnt “the tricks” as other artists did but decided he could not or would not be like “the others”. “I was always myself, different, a rebel”.

Henry can be scathing of other artists who, as he sees it, replicate what has already been said. Of Andy Warhol’s art, he states: “You can’t help being impressed but it didn’t go beyond that; it takes you to a certain point and then it stops.” It didn’t satisfy his yearning to understand and he searched in a different direction. His quantum painting puzzled him because “it was completely abstract”. One can only imagine his lone dedication, his meticulous, meditational application of paint, wiping away what was not right. He thinks an “artist always speaks to himself through his art.”

Throughout his life, Henry believes he has always had to fight. At our first meeting, he told me that I must fight, to be strong. He fought with his father, with art galleries, with “bandits” and “crooks” (“there are crooks everywhere, very strange people; I fight them if I have to”), verbally or more usually on paper, sometimes in court. He fights them in his art and believes it is “harder to draw the good because we know the bad more intimately. The bad, it hurts.” Henry’s been robbed in New York and London; mugged and beaten up; kicked by someone in his block of flats – “I took them to court and won”. I ask him if revenge is a good thing, he doesn’t think so, but justice is essential. His later paintings and all his belongings were taken from his flat and the locks changed, and this is the biggest source of pain for him. The injustice and the loss of his paintings, his final work, which he thinks is his best: “you cannot fully understand my art without those paintings”. It haunts him.

Always a dreamer, Henry eventually cut himself off from others; it was easier that way and it became “normal”. “I wanted to be secret. I wanted to be outside”. “No one understands the way of being [an artist]. You have to be completely by yourself.” “Nobody knew about me. I was by myself and in the end, I thought it was natural.” Latterly, he says he led the “life of a tramp”, “I just painted or drank”. “Your standing is very important, until it’s gone. And then it’s not important.” After a day’s painting in his flat in Redcliffe Gardens, he would take a bottle of red wine to Hyde Park where he would sit on his favourite bench by his favourite oak tree (now cut down). When I suggested teasingly he would make a good monk (but with wine), he smiled: “there’s still time to become one.” The glint in his eye tells another story, as do his

On his rejection by the artworld, Henry explains, “it’s not the end of the world. I’m a failed artist and that’s that. I tried my best; I could only do what I could do.” Fear never inhibited him and when I ask him if he thinks anything did impede him, he replies sharply, “my inability to succeed!”. His frustration at being ignored is evident and he feels the lack of money that hampered him. He understands how a small number of things becomes precious. He understood this when he was robbed in New York. And now he sits surrounded by memories and objects

accumulated by himself and his parents. He misses the items that he had in his flat, the golden angel that he bought in Oxfam, the Vietnamese figures he bought in Moscow, the giant African mask that adorned one wall and significantly his parents’ treasured antlers, the only item they brought with them to England.

Now Henry is interested in others exploring his paintings. At our first meeting, he asked me to explain one of his paintings to him. When I did, I asked him if that was what he meant, “something like that”, he replied. He is unstintingly curious. He sits on his bed watching clips on YouTube and when I arrive, he will ask, “What do you think of the Gnostics?”, “What do you think of Spinoza?”. He ponders and questions, wonders if we have free will; if life is fate or chance and plumps for the first one. Henry is led by his imagination and maintains that “everyone has their own world inside them”. He believes in telepathy and suggests, with a chuckle that we sit in silence. But what he means is that we know things instinctively if we allow ourselves to, explaining that people knew when others were alive after the war even when they had no contact with them. “They just knew.”

There is always a sense or source of menace in Henry’s paintings, but this is tempered by a sense of hope (“there is always hope”) and Henry acknowledges that we must have an experience of evil to understand goodness. He is worried that we are becoming desensitised and believes that we must be aware of the value of knowledge and have a realistic idea of what people are capable of. When he stayed with Polish relations on the Russian border in his early twenties, he recalls an old woman who told him of a convoy of prisoners who were being taking into the forest by Nazis. One prisoner fell down dead, exhausted and starved, and another rushed forward to eat some of the body, only to be taken into the forest to be shot with the other prisoners.

Concrete slabs were placed over the bodies, to hide the truth and horror of the murdered bodies. Another story tells of the Russian Orthodox priest at his mother’s village in Belarus whose photo was published in the paper of him lying drunk on the ground, his crucifix askew around his neck, to discredit him. Such stories stay with you and shape an artist who has always tried to make sense of the world. With his childhood in resettlement camps and his parents’ wartime experiences, it is easy to understand why Henry became a Surrealist.

Henry’s determination and resilience are palpable and even his stroke became an exploration for him. He spent three hours on the floor in the sitting room and three hours of sheer will dragging himself to the door to call for help. “Everything was black, there was no light”. “I had never had anything like it and wanted to see how I would react, if I would curse God”, but he didn’t, he “accepted it” and studied his reaction to it. Henry has a relationship with his “personal” God who he feels has tested him greatly. “God is innocent, it’s us, we are always the problem; we never know when to stop”. It felt audacious for him when he put God into his paintings.

Henry is fascinated by ideas about the afterlife, is always questioning, always imagining. He thinks he’s going to be dead soon and wants to “go to the next stage and see if I’m going to heaven or hell.” When I remonstrate that he’s not bad, he replies “not very bad, no”. He believes we will know everything after life, that God is “intelligence”, that he will finally understand. Sometimes he says he will see his mother again and he will apologise to her for his selfishness. Another time he says he wants to be alive after death; that he would wander through an unchanged Wiltshire countryside, that he wouldn’t need anyone about, and he wouldn’t be lonely “because you always have ideas”. He acknowledges that he’s been treated badly by some people but now thinks that none of that is important. I ask him if friends were ever important to him, for companionship and laughter. He says not, and yet, he wants to talk, doesn’t want me to go, wants me to come back. He’s surprised when I tell him he’s a nice person to be around – “Really?”, he questions.

All quotations are from Henry Orlik taken from conversations from April to September 2025, unless otherwise stated.

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS

Henry Orlik was born in Ankum, Germany on 6th January 1947. During the war, Henry’s mother, Lucyna Polch (1928-2002), was taken as slave labour by the Nazis from her village, Niacholsty near Brest, on the Belarus-Poland border, when Brest was captured by the Nazis in 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa. By the end of the war, half of Belarus’s population had been killed or deported. She was sent to a farm near Ankum in Western Germany, where she had to labour in exchange for food. She was a determined young girl, and at one point attempted an escape with a friend but was caught and returned to the farm.

Henry’s father, Jozef Orlik (1923-1998), was born into a family of glassblowers in Kraków, Poland. When the Nazis occupied the city in September 1939, life changed overnight. The Orlik family had to steal food from the Germans to survive and family history records that Jozef was hung up by his black hair and beaten by the Nazis because they thought he was Jewish and stealing food. It was “a shaping experience.”

Jozef wanted to join the Polish underground but was turned down as he was only sixteen. He was betrayed to the Germans by a fellow Pole for having a radio and like many Poles, was conscripted into the German army. He was taken through France where he escaped and joined the Franco-Polish underground before making his way to England. From there he was sent to Scotland to train as a paratrooper and served with the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade during Operation Market Garden at the Battle of Arnhem in September 1944 and subsequently took part in the advance into northern Germany. After the war, he met Lucyna, who had been freed and billeted at a moated castle near Ankum. Following their marriage, Henry was born there. Jozef had to fetch a German doctor at gunpoint after the doctor refused to attend the birth of a Polish baby.

Like many Poles, the Orliks decided to travel to England under the Polish Resettlement Scheme rather than risk returning to their Soviet-occupied homeland. Lucyna and the four-month-old Henry travelled with other women and families to England on the Queen Elizabeth in early 1948. They had no belongings and, curiously, the only item that Lucyna brought with her was a set of antlers taken from the walls of the castle. When asked

why, Henry stated, “it was because they are alive, the antlers are alive, like us”; antlers or antler-like trees later featured in several of his paintings. Jozef was still in the army, and the family was moved between several resettlement camps before arriving at Fairford Camp, in Gloucestershire when Henry was around four years old. From here, Henry was sent to board at St Francis Xavier School in Lower Bullingham, Herefordshire, a Polish boarding school run by the Marian Fathers as Jozef had a strong desire to “make me Polish”. He recalls arriving at the school, the fear of being left there and how his mother hid her tears at their parting. (“She was tough; she knew how to survive.”)

School photographs show Henry as a good-looking, stocky, young boy with unruly hair. His school reports reveal a well-mannered, shy boy who was hampered by his lack of English but whose art was “outstanding” and showed “considerable promise” while his arithmetic indicated “difficulties,” a problem that plagued him throughout his life. Henry recalls the school as being in a beautiful part of the world, but it was strict and disciplined, and many of the teachers were monks. Some of the teachers had been in concentration camps and “some were paedophiles” Henry disclosed though he gave no details, adding only that all experiences are good because they teach you to survive. There was Polish dancing, which Henry hated, mainly because it was an all-boys’ school and so they dressed some of the younger pupils, Henry included, as girls. He felt the humiliation strongly. Henry’s parents paid for his schooling by working outside the camp and travelled daily by bus to their work: Lucyna on a farm, and Jozef at Pressed Steel in Swindon, which he helped to build and where he subsequently found lifelong employment. During the holidays from school, Henry, along with other children, was looked after by trained nurses in the camp, while his parents were at work.

Henry’s first clear memories are of Fairford. They are good memories, “learning memories”, tinged with the nostalgia that gives childhood a golden glow of eternal summer; he recalls “feeling free when you went beyond the fence” of the camp, to roam and swim in the rivers in the idyllic countryside. He recalls the cinema which showed all the recent releases from Hollywood, given to the camp by the American Air Force base nearby; and the large theatre and the church built from the Nissan huts; of everything being “round” and “curved”, the walls and ceilings of the Nissan huts, the barracks in which the families were housed. They felt “space age”. The Orlik’s barracks were divided into two bedrooms, with a kitchen and a coal stove. There was

no running water in the huts but there was a communal toilet and shower block. There were trips for the children including to Bristol Zoo and Henry has a photo of him riding an elephant. It was a world contained within a wider world, and Henry recalls feeling free and unbound but his memories are tinged by the underlying menace of camp reality. This was the reality of a fear which came from displaced people carrying their wartime experiences with them: soldiers who did not want to, or could not, “acknowledge the reality of their existence”; people quarrelling and fighting; the “noise behind the toilet block” that his parents complained about; shared spaces with people from concentration camps who were deeply troubled and who the children “learnt to avoid” as well as the many “crooks”, and people “on the make”, trying to get on, to make something of nothing. “You got a sense of the people who you can trust; you had to be on your wits, to move away.” It was paradoxical, a dog-eat-dog world, surrounded by beautiful rolling countryside and children innocently playing in the midst of it. It was hard to interpret for a sensitive boy trying to make sense of the world.

The family moved to Daglingworth Camp in 1958 when Henry was eleven. This was a smaller camp in the undulating landscape of the Cotswolds. Today there is no memorial, sign or trace of a Polish camp in this quintessential English village. Henry was determined to attend an English school and not continue at the Marian Brothers senior school in Henley where his father wanted to send him. He begged his mother to let him try an English school and fortunately, she fought for him, securing his place at Cirencester County Secondary School, which he travelled to by bus. He felt liberated after the restrictive regime of his previous Catholic school. But from this time, Jozef became even more distant, “nasty,” as Henry put it, disappointed that his son showed no willingness to become the Polish boy he wished him to be. According to Henry, his father never spoke about his war experiences, was meticulous in his work and never had a day off sick; but he drank heavily and there was often shouting in the household.

In 1963, the family visited Kraków together when Henry was sixteen. He recalled having nothing in common with his Polish relations and little interest in them. He remembers an old man, probably his grandfather, shaking his hand and crying, which he didn’t like. “I didn’t want to know any Poles because they were foreign to me. They thought differently about things, had different experiences.” The man who betrayed his father to the Nazis was still living in the locality and had to “go on holiday” to avoid a confrontation with Jozef. Henry recalled a similar paradox to that of the resettlement camps. He saw the intellectual historic city famous for its beauty and culture, but on the outskirts was Auschwitz, which none of his relations mentioned.

Henry visited Belarus with his mother to see her family and attended his only Russian Orthodox service there, among people “who dared to go.” The service “was long” but he liked the icons, “they were alive”. He recalled visiting a museum in St Petersburg with his mother filled with icons that

seemed “dead,” because they had been removed from their proper setting. He remembered the overarching sense of mistrust: “the people were all watching each other”. His grandmother had once owned land, but it had since been absorbed into a collective farm, and she was allowed only a single cow. He never asked what had happened to his grandfather – it was something no one talked about. Everyone drank and Henry recalls being continually drunk on horrible vodka. But Lucyna was happier there, different from how she was in England where “she lived in fear of the Poles” who had never completely accepted her because they saw her as Russian.

Henry describes how his mother was caught in the middle of arguments between him and his father, and he was caught in the middle of theirs. Eventually Henry and Jozef avoided each other, with Henry living upstairs and his father downstairs. His father was moody and drank, frustrated that Henry could not fulfil the role he wished for him. “Maybe that’s why I’m a surrealist. A father who didn’t want to know …”. Lucyna compensated where she could, “She was brave, but it was hard for her. She had to be quiet, stay in the background.” “She was unbelievably strong; where did she get that strength and wisdom?” When asked what rank his father had been in the army, Henry didn’t know, but laughed and said, “A general … a general in our house.” “He spent his time between their army and our army; it was all he knew.” Jozef wanted to return to Poland and occasionally Lucyna wanted to as well, but they changed their minds. They saw life under the Soviets, how they would have to restart, and it was not a realistic choice. “It would be a fantasy. Real life was here.”

Henry showed immense promise in his art and in 1964 he enrolled at Swindon Art College where he studied for three years, continuing his studies at Gloucestershire College of Art, Cheltenham between 1966 and 1969. After that “you had to choose a profession” and his mother wanted him to be an architect, his father wanted him to get a job, to earn a steady income. Henry only wanted to be an artist and had a painting accepted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1971. He moved to Evelyn Gardens in South Kensington, an area he liked because of its beautiful buildings. He started to make a name for himself, having a highly acclaimed one man show at the world-renowned Surrealist Art Centre, Acoris, in Brook Street in 1972 and participating in the mixed Surrealist Masters exhibitions in 1972 and 1974 exhibiting alongside Surrealist masters such as René Magritte, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dalí. Roland Penrose visited him in his flat and admired his paintings.

In 1978 he had a solo exhibition at the Drian Galleries, owned by the Polish artist Halima Nalecz, whom Henry disliked and at the Obelisk Galleries. It was a heady, exciting time in London and Henry did his best to make sales and charm clients, though he was often bored by people. He attended parties with fellow artists but, “it was all about getting drunk; that was the reason for them”.

During the 1970s, Henry made several visits to Poland and Belarus and one extended stay in Poland where he lived in Warsaw for five weeks. He found the city to be like a “stage set”, the centre had been rebuilt after the war, but some buildings were still pock-marked with bullet holes. He visited Berlin in 1976 and remembers Checkpoint Charlie. All the while, he visited galleries and left them slides of his work in the hope of exhibitions. Ambitious, he did the same in Paris, even sending slides to Japan, but nothing came of it.

Pavlik Stooshnoff, a flamboyant Pole, took over Acoris’s premises in Brook Street, after Von Kessel, the owner of Acoris declared bankruptcy (and was subsequently jailed for fraud). Henry recalls Stooshnoff organising a private dinner for him at Blake’s, Anouska Hempel’s hotel, where all “the artists and

famous people hung out”. Stooshnoff introduced Henry to Beverly Coburn, the ex-wife of James Coburn, and they hit it off. She bought a couple of his paintings and invited him to stay with her in Beverly Hills. Henry visited New York in 1979 for a couple of weeks and decided to return to America the following year to stay for a couple of months at Beverly’s son’s house while he was away. Henry disliked the Beverly Hills lifestyle which he saw as people imprisoning themselves in gated communities. The parties bored him, and he hated the petty hierarchies and how millionaires would “lie around snorting coke”, “it was a waste of time”. He felt controlled and avoided the parties so he could concentrate on painting, eventually moving to New York in 1981, remaining there until 1985.

We have Lucyna’s letters to Henry from his time in New York. They are simple, affectionate letters which express a mother’s concerns, words of love and encouragement to her beloved son, whose art she did not understand. She would try to relieve his concerns and explain the money she was sending to him. Lines leap out from her letters written in Polish, explaining how hard life can be for an honest man; how he must pursue his dreams but avoid overwork, “it reflects on the paintings”; that his time hasn’t come yet (“everything has its time, just do not worry”); that he must explore what is important to him; go to the Park, sunbathe and relax because winter is coming; eat lots of fresh fruit; that her belief was God will reward him; telling him “money is a pile of notes, and tomorrow there is none”; moreover, he must have courage. One letter reveals that she did not receive a letter from him for two years (although he sent her tape recordings) and when she did receive one, she read it ten times.

Henry returned to London in 1985, exhausted by New York and struggles he faced in selling his work. He managed to find a flat in Redcliffe Square, drawn by its architecture, its proximity to museums and galleries, and above all its tall ceilings, which allowed him to paint large “human-scale” canvases. For a time, he continued to try to sell his work but became ever-more disillusioned with the art world and retreated from public life to concentrate on painting. He would bring his finished canvases, rolled up in tubes, by coach, to his parents’ house where he would store them. They remained in their house after their deaths and have only recently been revealed. Henry, himself, has not seen them in years.

In 2018, the locks of Henry’s London flat were changed without his knowledge, and he was unable to enter the premises. This devastated him. He returned to live in Swindon and had a debilitating stroke in 2022. He was in hospital for many months before he was able to return home.

All quotations are from Henry Orlik, taken from conversations with Sara Clemence between April to September 2025, unless otherwise stated.

Biography

1947: 6th January, born in Ankum, Germany

1948: arrives in United Kingdom at four months old

1948-1954: various resettlement camps in England

1951-1958: Fairford Camp (aged about 4-11)

1958-1961: Daglingworth Camp (aged 11-14)

1961-1964: Penhill, Swindon (aged 14-17)

1962: aged 16: first visit to Krakow

1964-present: Swindon

1968: aged 21: first visit to Belarus

c. 1971-1978: Evelyn Gardens, SW7

1972: aged 25: stay in Warsaw for five weeks and travel around Poland

1973: aged 26: visit to Berlin

1977: visit to New York for a few weeks

1979-1980: Camberwell Grove, SE5

1980: New York to Beverly Hills

c. 1980-1985: New York

Cromwell Road

Redcliffe Square, SW10

2022: stroke

Education

1954-57: St Francis Xavier School, Lower Bullingham, Hereford: Polish boarding school run by Marian Fathers

1958-1960: Cirencester County Secondary School

1961-1963: Polish School, Swindon: studied Polish, history, language and geography; took part in Lodz performances (Polish dancing)

1960-1963: St Joseph’s Secondary School, Swindon

1962: London Art College, correspondence course

1963-67: Swindon Art College

1967-70: Gloucestershire College of Art, Cheltenham, diploma in Art and Design

1970: Art teacher’s Certificate, Brighton College of Art

Solo Exhibitions

1972: Acoris Surrealist Art Centre, Brook Street, London, W1

1974: Stooshnoff Fine Art, Brook Street, London, W1

1978: Drian Galleries, 7 Porchester Place, London, W2

1978: ‘Henry Orlik’, 15th November –7th December, Obelisk Galleries, 15 Crawford Street, London, W1H 1PF

1994: ‘Retrospective’, Exhibition Hall, Swiss Cottage Central Library, London, NW3

2024: 9-20th August, ‘Henry Orlik, Cosmos of Dreams’, Winsor Birch at The Maas Gallery, Duke Street, St. James’s, London, SW1Y

2024: 23rd August – 17th September, ‘Henry Orlik, Cosmos of Dreams, Part Two’, Winsor Birch, Marlborough, SN8

2025: 17-29th June, ‘Henry Orlik, Surreal Metropolis’, Winsor Birch at Kate Oh Gallery, New York

Group Exhibitions

1971: The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, where exhibited People

1972: ‘Surrealist Masters’, Acoris, Brook Street, London, W1

1974: ‘Surrealist Masters’, Acoris, Brook Street, London, W1

1977: ‘4 Artists’, Aberbach Fine Art, Saville Row, London, W1, including painting called Refugees

1977: ‘Annual Exhibition’, POSK (Polish Social and Cultural Association), King Street, Hammersmith, London, W6

1978: Chelsea Artists’ Annual Show

1979: Chelsea Artists’ Annual Show

1979: ‘Portraits’, POSK (Polish Social and Cultural Association), King Street, Hammersmith, London, W6, exhibited portrait of Lucyna Orlik

1983: 80 Washington Square East Galleries, New York University

2025: 28th July – 16th August, ‘Master Painters & Pioneers, 18th to 20th Century’, Winsor Birch at Gallery 8, 8 Duke Street, St. James’s, London, SW1Y

Published in 2025 by Winsor Birch.

ISBN: 978-1-0369-6751-2

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