Andrzej Nowacki

Andrzej Nowacki (b. 15 October 1953 in Rabka) is a painter representing geometric abstraction and op-art. He spent his early youth in Kraków; in 1977 he left Poland, studying Scandinavian studies in Gothenburg and German studies and art history in Innsbruck. The breakthrough proved to be his meeting at the beginning of the 1980s with two Polish geometric abstractionists - Kajetan Sosnowski and Henryk Stażewski, whose studio he visited many times and with whom he stayed in contact for many years. In 1984 he settled permanently in West Berlin, devoting himself to creative work.

Nowacki's first solo exhibition was held at the Pommersfelde Gallery in Berlin in 1987, and from 1988 he began to create reliefs - at first painted on hardboard. From the end of the 1980s he builds above all abstract reliefs composed on canvas into rhythmic arrangements of contrasting colours. The stylistics of his works derive from the tradition of Stażewski, Josef Albers and the Russian avant-garde (Malevich, Tatlin, Popova); the basic form is the square - the embodiment of harmonious order. Thanks to his self-mixed acrylic paints, the shapes and colours interpenetrate, so that colour becomes form and form colour.

Since 1996 the artist signs his works with the date of their creation. He collaborated with Heinz Teufel, the owner of Europe's leading gallery of concrete art, and in 1997 he showed an exhibition together with Jan Lenica at the Avantgarde Galerie in Berlin. He was a holder of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2001); his first retrospective exhibition was prepared for him by the International Cultural Centre in Kraków (2002). His works are held, among others, in the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin and in collections in Europe and the USA.