Collection

Painter, creator of drawings, teacher. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he currently teaches in the Faculty of Media Art. He has created images uniting words and geometric abstract elements since 1985. The stencilled inscriptions on his canvases are personal and frequently amusing commentaries on the history and market of art, artistic life, and social realities. His canvases read “Haven’t seen you for a while at a contemporary art exhibition” and “If my pieces are pretty, I even paint them a second time.” He managed the Young Artists Gallery in Warsaw’s Bielany district in 1984–1992. Winner of the Jan Cybis Award for 2001, and nominated for the Polityka Passport Award (2000 and 2006). He lives and works in Warsaw.

Paweł Susid is not interested in depicting people or objects. “I found any form of competing with photography or film with the ever-deforming hand pretentious”, the artist declared at the outset of his career. He proceeded to paint hugely subtextual and frequently humorous paintings using simple form and verbally expressed content. Here is what he says about the piece I Confuse Stażewski with Strzemiński: “I painted this to confirm my method of communicating with the viewer.” This is an early piece from a series of identically inscribed works, others owned by the national museums in Szczecin and Łódź, or by private collectors. The work was created in the late 1980s and remains an exception in the Foundation’s collection, which mostly includes post-1990 artworks.