From today’s perspective, heliography comes across as a simple idea that combines elements of graphic design, photography, and painting, similar to the inventions of László Moholy-Nagy, Christian Schad, or Man Ray. Hiller, in his experiments which he commenced in the late 1920s, used tempera paint and gouache, drew on transparent celluloid film, applied electricity or unmixable fluids, covered the surface of the film with emulsions and provoked the formation of sediments among chemically active substances. Being knowledgeable in physics and chemistry, Hiller made use of photographic paper's properties, in order to, as he wrote, “revolutionize the matter, reconstruct natural elements and forms of vegetation, and to create new galaxies.”
Karol Hiller’s biography is helpful in understanding his multifaceted invention. Born into a modest family of textile workers, he was raised by his father to be a dyer. He studied chemistry in Darmstadt and Warsaw, but dreamt of going to an art school in the capital of tsarist Russia, Saint Petersburg. Due to the turmoil of World War I, he landed in Moscow, and in 1916 moved to Kiev, where he began to take classes from Mikhail Boichuk, who drew inspiration from Byzantine icons. He left Bolshevik-infested Russia together with his family in 1921, and returned to Łódź, leaving his early works behind. Back in Poland, he worked as a journalist, art critic, leftist activist, and animator of social life of the avant-garde gathered around Władysław Strzemiński, and eventually, in 1929, he decided to devote himself entirely to art. When the German army invaded Łódź, he didn’t try to escape or hide – he considered that futile and disgraceful. He was captured by the Gestapo in November 1939 and executed the next month in a forest near Łódź. After Hiller’s death, his wife tried to salvage his legacy, but most of his works – especially paintings – went missing. Heliographic reproduction of works of paper has allowed for preservation of many of them, and among them, the exceptional composition with the scale.