Andrzej Szewczyk

About artist

Born
16.03.1950
Died
29.09.2001
Country
Poland

Born in Szopienice in 1950 and died in Cieszyn in 2001; lived in Kaczyce Górne, Pogwizdów and Cieszyn; studied at the Department of Art Education of the Cieszyn Branch of Katowice’s Silesian University (1974-78); one of the most interesting Polish post-war artists, a painter, a graphic artist and a sculptor; active in the field of assemblage, environments and happenings as well as an outstanding educator. From 1977, he collaborated with Galeria Foksal in Warsaw. He treated art as a continuous process. His first works represented an attempt to overcome the traditional form and structure of paintings. This can be clearly seen in his 1971 series of paintings showing parallel stripes painted with emulsion paint on mirrors. In another series of his works entitled Painting is Something Visible he makes use of school colouring books and maps. He further expanded on those ideas from the late 1970s in his series The Uniform Nature of the Concepts of Painting a Picture and Painting a Wall executed by hand by house painters using decorative paint rollers. His 1978 Paintings from the Peasants serves as a finale to his reflections on this matter, in which he uses original painting materials to put onto canvas full-scale sections of walls from fishing huts. From the late 1970s, books, writing and calligraphy came to the fore in Szewczyk’s art. He first produced a series of works where sheets of paper, scrolls and books were covered with ink stains spread in linear order with thin outlines around them (Adam and Eve, 1978-84). From 1981 he started to create his most characteristic and original works, in which he used shredded coloured pencils and pieces of wood covered with text written with drops of lead. He used shredded wood pencils and pistachio nut shells, stuck in rows of the same length to wooden boards and canvases, usually covered with wax and paint, to create a kind of image-boards full of pictorial letters. His titles often refer to specific literary works pointing to a network of literary references and fascinations and at the same time revealing his profound erudite knowledge. He participated in many prestigious exhibitions, including the 16th Biennial of Art held in São Paulo in 1981, “Polish Realities”, Third Eye Centre, staged in Glasgow in 1988, and “Europa, Europa” shown in Bonn in 1994. His works can be found in Cieszyn’s Museum of Cieszyn Silesia (with a monographic room devoted to the artist), the Łódź Museum of Art, the National Museums in the cities of Poznań, Warsaw and Wroclaw, the Upper Silesian Museum in Bytom, the Chełm Museum, the Ujazdów Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the Polish Sculpture Centre in Orońsko, Galeria Bielska BWA, and in numerous public and private collections in both Poland and other countries.

Works

Andrzej Szewczyk

Leaves… Edgar Varese

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Andrzej Szewczyk

Elysium – Hölderlin

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Andrzej Szewczyk

Untitled

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