Jan Dobkowski

Jan Dobkowski (b. 1942 in Łomża) is a painter, draughtsman and author of spatial arrangements, artistic actions and theoretical texts - one of the most important figures of the Polish scene of the 1960s and 1970s. After the Secondary School of Fine Arts in Warsaw he studied at the Faculty of Painting of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (1962-1968), under Professors Juliusz Studnicki and Jan Cybis, in whose studio he defended his diploma with the rector's distinction.

Already during his studies he worked out an individual language. In 1967, together with his fellow student Jerzy Zieliński (Jurry), during preparations for a joint exhibition, he announced the founding of the Neo-Neo-Neo group; the artists exhibited together until 1970. Dobkowski built the picture from a few pure, contrasting colours - most often red and green - laying them flatly and smoothly, in silhouette-treated forms with the shapes of people and objects, captured with a precise, undulating and decorative line. This aesthetic, close to pop-art, served to affirm nature: on green, vital grounds appeared red silhouettes full of sensuality and eroticism, in which forms passed fluidly into one another - a breast into an apple, a heart into a spermatozoon. „For it is precisely Nature that gives us the feeling that we exist”, he said.

The breakthrough came quickly. His success at the exhibition „Secession-Secession?” at the Galeria Współczesna in Warsaw (1968) secured him participation in the Paris exhibition „Polish Contemporary Painting. Sources and Explorations”, and shortly afterwards the Guggenheim Museum in New York purchased his „Double Girl” (1968) - the artist's first red-and-green painting, the starting point of a whole cycle in the unified format of 200 × 150 cm.

In 1972, as a scholar of the Kościuszko Foundation, he travelled to New York. In the following decades the cycles „Erotikon” (1980), „Hope and Darkness” and „Either - Or” came into being, and his works from the martial-law period - held back by the censors - were permeated by pessimism (including a painting dedicated to the memory of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko). Laureate of the gold medal of „Złote Grono” in Zielona Góra (1970), the C.K. Norwid Art Criticism Award for the best exhibition of the year (1978) and the Jan Cybis Award for his lifetime achievement (1994), he has works in the collections of the Museum of Art in Łódź, the National Museums in Warsaw, Wrocław and Poznań and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Consistent and distinct, Dobkowski remains one of the most recognisable painters of the Polish post-war avant-garde.