Andrzej Szewczyk

Andrzej Szewczyk (1950, Szopienice near Katowice - 2001) was a painter, draughtsman, sculptor and poet (though he never wrote a poem) - one of the most interesting and most distinct figures of post-war Polish art, gifted with a remarkable poetic imagination. He linked his life with Cieszyn Silesia - in Cieszyn, where he lived and worked, the artistic milieu regarded him as a mentor. He practised „pure” art, not commenting on the immediate reality but arising from existence and from questions about being itself.

A great role in his work was played by writing - „writing pictures” close to the tradition of icon-writing and meditation. Szewczyk saw no essential difference between painting, drawing and writing; he questioned the individualism of expression and authorship („all my art is from manual work, as if the one who works with his hands spoke with his hands”). His first repeatable signs-letters were the traces of house painters' rollers on walls and canvases; in 1978, at his first exhibition at the Galeria Foksal, he showed „Paintings from Chłopy” - faithful, 1:1-scale renderings of the walls of fishermen's cottages.

From the beginning of the 1980s his most characteristic works came into being: oak-and-lead „books”, in which he poured liquid lead into drilled holes like seals - „Monuments to Franz Kafka's Letters to Felice Bauer” (1981-1984), „Diaries”, „Libraries” - as well as works in which he used pencil shavings and pistachio shells as letters, signs and words, and calligraphic manuscripts in scrolls. „A sheet of paper written by me in ink led me to the Book, which became for me the Promised Land”, he noted. He was most strongly associated with the Galeria Foksal and the Museum of Art in Łódź, and from 2000 with the Muzalewska Gallery in Poznań; his retrospective „The Artist is an Argument” was held at the Bielska BWA Gallery.