Frans Krajberg

FRANS KRAJCBERG (Poland, 1921- Brazil,2017).
Untitled.
Carved wood.
Signed in the lower right area. Signature of the workshop on the back.
Measurements: 60 x 30 x 20 cm; 80 x 53 cm (frame).
Frans Krajcberg was a Brazilian painter, sculptor, engraver and photographer of Polish origin, known for his environmental activism, Krajcberg denounced the destruction of Brazilian forests by using materials such as burnt wood from illegal forest fires in his works.
Krajcberg, a Polish Jew, was born in Kozienice in 1921. His family died or disappeared in the Holocaust. He was arrested at age 13 during this period, but escaped to enlist in the Russian army in World War II. Hospitalized at a station in Minsk, he began painting while recovering. He fought in the Polish army during World War II as an officer between 1941 and 1945. After the war, Krajcberg sought refuge in the Soviet Union, where he studied engineering and art at Leningrad State University. He then studied in Germany at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, where he was a student of Willi Baumeister. Krajcberg participated in the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951. From 1948 to 1954 he traveled between Paris, Ibiza and Rio de Janeiro, where he produced his first works of art based on nature.
In 1956, Krajcberg moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he shared a studio with sculptor Franz Weissmann. With few financial resources, he began his career in Rio de Janeiro, initiating his involvement in the artistic community through his work at the city's Museum of Modern Art. The following year, he obtained Brazilian nationality. After a period in which he moved between Spain and France between 1958 and 1962 and worked with Japanese paper, he returned to Brazil. He began a period of work in a cave in Pico de Itabirito, Minas Gerais, with this Japanese paper to record the traces of the rocks, and also used minerals found there as natural pigments for painting. In 1964, Krajcberg made his first sculptures with cedar wood. He made several trips to the Amazon rainforest and the Pantanal, photographing and documenting deforestation, as well as collecting materials for his works, such as charred tree roots and trunks.
In the 1970s, Krajcberg gained international recognition in the context of the environmental movements that were gaining attention at the time.

In 1978, he co-directed a film, Manifesto do Naturalismo Integral (or Manifesto do Rio Negro), with Pierre Restany and Sepp Baendereck. It documents the Amazonian nature they encountered on a trip they made to the Rio Negro. Their aim was to highlight the destruction that was taking place and to show their opposition to it. He also actively documented illegal forest fires through photographic reports and continuously denounced them with his burnt wood sculptures throughout the 1980s.