Franciszka Themerson’s practice resists the boundaries of medium. Painting, drawing, illustration, book design, film and theatre were not discrete activities within her career, but interconnected forms through which she investigated the figure, movement, language and the unstable relationship between representation and abstraction.

Although her work became widely associated with the experimental culture she developed with Stefan Themerson, Franciszka’s own practice was fundamentally rooted in painting. She trained at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1931 with the highest distinction, and throughout her career continued to regard drawing and painting as central to her artistic enquiry. As the critic and curator Jasia Reichardt later observed, “essentially — or originally — she was a painter for whom line became an autograph language.”

Line is indeed the organising principle of Themerson’s work. It describes, constructs and destabilises the human figure simultaneously. Her early drawings developed a cast of eccentric, often bowler-hatted figures: comic and apparently self-contained characters whose gestures and postures gradually became less caricatural and more psychologically charged. Themerson later described the transformation of these figures as a movement away from the comic gentleman towards the vulnerable human being — towards figures capable of fear, suffering and uncertainty.

It was this intersection of the figurative and the abstract that led Themerson to describe her mature painting as “bi-abstraction.” The term is revealing. Rather than abandoning figuration for abstraction, she allowed the two conditions to coexist: bodies emerge from fields of marks, lines become spatial structures, and recognisable forms hover between depiction and dissolution. The resulting paintings possess an unusual tension between apparent simplicity and considerable formal complexity.

This same fluidity characterises her drawings. Improvisation, satire and an acute sensitivity to the gestures of everyday life are brought together through a remarkably economical line. Her subjects range across the human world — its pleasures, anxieties, absurdities and contradictions — while the act of drawing itself remains visible.

Themerson’s engagement with Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi provides perhaps the clearest demonstration of the permeability of her practice. For the first English edition, published by the Themersons’ Gaberbocchus Press in 1951, she produced 204 drawings directly onto the lithographic plates carrying Barbara Wright’s handwritten translation. The drawings do not simply illustrate the text; image and typography occupy the same visual field, creating a work in which reading and looking become inseparable.

Her relationship with Ubu continued for decades, moving from book illustration into theatre design and finally into an extensive sequence of drawings. For Michael Meschke’s 1964 production at Stockholm’s Marionetteatern, Themerson designed masks, costumes and sets; between 1967 and 1970 she returned to the subject in a sequence of ninety large drawings.

This movement between disciplines is central to understanding Themerson. The book becomes a space for drawing; drawing becomes theatre; theatre becomes an investigation of the body; and the body, in her paintings, becomes a means of approaching abstraction.

Rather than illustrating an idea, Themerson’s line thinks its way towards one. Her work occupies the space between humour and unease, figuration and abstraction, order and improvisation — a space in which the act of looking remains active, uncertain and continually open.