Jan Pamuła

Jan Pamuła (1944, Spytkowice — 2022) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków from 1961 to 1968, in the studio of Hanna Rudzka-Cybis, learning at the same time the graphic techniques — woodcut, engraving and lithography. In the academic year 1966/1967 he took an internship at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in the studio of Lucien Coutaud.

In the early 1970s he turned towards geometric abstraction and Concrete art. He read Hegel and Kierkegaard, and above all Swedenborg; he valued Paul Klee's theory of colour and Mondrian's Neoplastic manifesto, and treated geometry as a path to universal truths. Out of this reflection grew the cycles “Arrangements with a Triangle”, “Chromatic Sets” and “Canons”, as well as the three-dimensional “Geometric Objects”.

The most important turn was brought by the computer. As early as 1980, on a scholarship at the Sorbonne in Paris, he created his first “Computer Series”, and in 1982 he presented the work “The Application of Electronic Digital Machines in Visual Art”. From permutational, computer-generated divisions of the plane he built patterns that were then transferred onto canvas — as one of the first Polish artists he made the computer a tool of painting.

His abstraction was called “geometric-romantic”: the strict, modular logic of the construction was accompanied by a restrained palette, limited to a few shades in balanced proportions. Pamuła was also an influential theorist and teacher — he lectured on Władysław Strzemiński's theory of vision, taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków from 1974, and from 2002 to 2008 was its rector; on his initiative the academy's museum and publishing house were founded. He belonged to the Second Kraków Group and was a fellow of the Kościuszko Foundation and of the Fulbright Program.

His works are held, among others, at the National Museums in Warsaw and Kraków and at MOCAK in Kraków, and in 2021 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Olomouc devoted a retrospective to him as a pioneer of computer art in Poland. Today, as art history rewrites the chapter on the beginnings of digital art — a current opened in the West by Vera Molnár and Frieder Nake — Pamuła's work awaits a full, international reading.