Jan Berdyszak

Jan Berdyszak (1934, Zawory — 2014, Poznań) took his first drawing lessons from his father, Józef. From 1952 to 1958 he studied sculpture in the studio of Bazyli Wojtowicz at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznań, with which he was to bind his entire professional life: from 1965 he taught in the Sculpture Studio, from 1970 to 1980 he headed the Department of Painting and Sculpture in Architecture and Urban Planning, and from 1984 to 1987 he served as vice-rector.

The central problem of his art crystallised in the very first years after his studies: space. Trained as a sculptor — an artist working in space — he carried this thinking over onto the painting. The cycles “Double Circles” (1962–1964) and “Compositions of Circles” opened up the form of the canvas; in 1965, in “Structural Painting with an Opening III”, he cut a real opening in the canvas for the first time, letting real space into the work. This gesture — a symbiosis of painting and sculpture — became the foundation of his entire subsequent path.

Berdyszak translated into visual language the notions of openness, emptiness, absence, incompleteness and infinity; he called space “the primary being”. His deeply reflective work, inspired by the thought of the East, developed in consistent series combining paintings, sculptures, installations and prints — from the “Transparent” works and the “Concentrating Areas” (1970s), through the “Beams” (1989), to “Passe-partout” (from 1990), in which the subject became the frame itself and the emptiness surrounding it.

He was an artist of many fields. From 1961 to 1981 he worked in theatre stage design (Teatr Marcinek, Teatr 5), co-created the Biennale of Children's Art and wrote theoretical works on the relations between theatre and the visual arts. As a teacher at the Poznań school — today the University of the Arts — he shaped successive generations of artists.

His position was already firmly established in the 1960s. He received, among others, the Jan Cybis Award (1978), the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2001), the Gloria Artis Gold Medal (2008) and an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (1999). Shown from the Biennale de Paris (1969) to exhibitions in Baltimore, Mexico and Nuremberg, he was honoured with major retrospectives at the Zachęta in Warsaw (2003) and at the National Museum in Poznań (2014). His works are held, among others, at the National Museums in Kraków, Warsaw and Poznań, and at the Staatliche Museen in Berlin.

Berdyszak remains one of the most radical Polish artists of the second half of the twentieth century — an artist who led the painting beyond its own limits and made that which cannot be seen the subject of art. Today, as the art of reduction and concept returns to the centre of attention, his consistent investigation of emptiness reads as a chapter still calling for a full reading.