Zdzislaw Beksinski was a Polish artist best known for his surreal dystopian imagery. His paintings, photographs, and prints depicted macabre otherworldly spaces and figures. “I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams,” he once reflected. Born on February 24, 1929 in Sanok, Poland, Beksinski had no formal art training, but instead studied architecture at the Kraków University of Technology. He found work in his hometown as a vehicle designer after graduating, indulging his interest in photography during his free time. Throughout his career, Beksinski was interested in fantasy, sadomasochism, and erotica, as evidenced in his famous image Sadist’s Corset (1957), a photograph of a woman’s bare backside tightly and irregularly bound with black string.
That picture when it came out was heavily criticized for at that time only photography of real things was considered an artform, it wasn't used to make a creative statement, Beksinkski challenged such ideas throughout his career, he quit photography soon as he said it limited his creativity and there was nothing more he wanted to express through that artform, and devoted himself to painting.