Collection

Painter, creator of installations, performance artist, teacher. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in Prof. Stefan Gierowski’s studio and co-founded the celebrated painting collective Gruppa. Vivid poster references, the use of symbols, political and social engagement are properties of works the artist has created since the 1980s. Apart from paintings rich in symbolism and metaphors, Woźniak focuses on installation as his lead medium, with objects occasionally developed from his own paintings. He lives and works in Warsaw.

Having abandoned the “wild” and expressive style of painting he employed as a member of the famous Gruppa, Ryszard Woźniak began using a limited colour palette in the 1990s, focusing, as it were, on problems extending beyond the space of his works themselves. In this painting, he interprets the ideas of library and culture as a set of metaphors, and of human connection with nature. The title of the piece is based on theke, the Greek for “repository”.

Ryszard Woźniak reaches for the aesthetics of advertising, placing a word on canvas and outlining all forms with approximated contours. Yet the logic of the commercial message is distorted by the display of the painter’s technique: smudges of paint, and canvas texture. The inscription is ambiguous as well. Frammenti, the Italian word for “fragments”, are visible in the blend, but imagination allows the viewer to discern and add other words as well, such as “ferment”. The strategy Woźniak uses distorts the overall order and offers amusing commentaries on reality.