Dimensions: 150 x 160 cm
signed, dated and described on the reverse: 'WLODEK PAWLAK | W. STRZEMINSKI. NOTES ON ART | RUSSIAN | 150 x 160 | 1989'.
Literature
Włodzimierz Pawlak. Self-Portrait in Afterimages, exhibition catalog, Zachęta - National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 2008, cat. no. 160, pp. 90 (il.), 142 (list)
Biography
He was a free student and later a student in Rajmund Ziemski's studio at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. While still a student, he became a member of Gruppa in 1982. He was a participant in almost all of its exhibitions and actions, co-editor of the magazine "Oj dobrze już", in which he published poems, manifestos, texts of readings. Together with Gruppa, he participated in the independent art movement of the 1980s. During this period he became known as an artist sensitive to the social and political entanglements of the time of martial law. He commented on the situation by using unsophisticated, straightforward metaphors, as in the series "Pigs" (1983), or symbolic transformations of the five-pointed star, as in the paintings CZERWONY AUTOBUS RUSZA W DROGĘ DOOKOŁA ŚWIATA, DROGA Z PIEKŁA DO PIEKŁA (1984). Pawlak's series of graduation paintings is titled "Painted Paintings" (1985), as the artist had the intention (unrealized) to paint them in the presence of the graduation committee. This was to be a gesture of destruction and at the same time solidarity with the anonymous "painters" of political inscriptions on walls. In a group of paintings from 1986-1987, he used the procedure of obscuring the composition with a layer of paint masking it, which was an original transfer and consolidation in art of the characteristic motif of painted political slogans on walls (I DON'T SPEAK, I DON'T SEE, I DON'T HEAR, WHERE WE COME FROM, WHO WE ARE, WHERE WE GO, BREAKING GLASS TUBES). He made a radical change in form in the series "Didactic Tables" (1987-1988). The planes of the paintings are filled with graphic grids of ideograms, charts, maps, signs symbolizing knowledge and culture. They were compared to the negative of an outlined school blackboard.
