Pioneer of the Polish avant-garde: illustrator, filmmaker and set designer Franciszka Themerson

Partners do not often make the best creative collaborators, but husband and wife Franciszka and Stefan Themerson defied convention to become perhaps the most important experimental filmmakers in pre-war Poland. Nor did they stop at film: between the years of 1929 until they died in 1988, the duo also collaborated to produce work for their independent Warsaw-based publishing house Gaberbocchus Press with Stefan as editor and Franciszka as artistic director.

In a career which pushed at the edges of avant-garde, Franciszka was responsible for several projects based on Alfred Jarry’s absurd pre-modernist play Ubu Roi, a book, the stage design of a marionette production of the play and a comic of the story. In 1951, Ubu Roi was translated by Barbara Wright for Gaberbocchus Press and became the couple’s most celebrated book for it’s radical content and Franciszka’s design and illustrations. Mirroring the anarchism of the text, Franciszka’s illustrations contained text hand written on lithographic plates and printed the book on then-daring yellow paper.

This autumn, from 4 November – 16 December, a new solo exhibition at L’étrangère gallery in London titled Franciszka Themerson: Lines and Thoughts will uncover the paintings, drawings and calligrammes of avant-garde artist Franciszka. Franciszka’s inspirations from stories and literature, Dada, Carroll and Lear are highly visible in deceptively contemporary looking line drawings.