Marek Sobczyk

Marek Sobczyk (b. 30 November 1955 in Warsaw) is a painter, graphic artist, art theorist and teacher. He studied painting at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (1975-1980), receiving his diploma in the studio of Stefan Gierowski - partly censored by the authorities of the school. In 1983, together with five other artists, he co-founded Gruppa (Ryszard Grzyb, Paweł Kowalewski, Jarosław Modzelewski, Włodzimierz Pawlak, Ryszard Woźniak), exhibiting with it until the end of its activity and co-editing the magazine „Oj dobrze już”, in which he placed theoretical texts.

After an initial abstract period, Sobczyk's painting - figurative, provocative, sometimes obscene - has from the mid-1980s concentrated on current events: politics dominates in it, and the compositions can be saturated with national and religious symbols and paraphrases of sacred iconography. An important element of many pictures is text. He readily painted together with his colleagues - with Ryszard Woźniak (1983) and Jarosław Modzelewski (1984 and again in the 1990s).

Sobczyk is also a graphic designer and typographer (in 1990-2004 he ran the company Zafryki with Piotr Młodożeniec) and a theorist - the author of a „Course in Abstraction” (1996) and a „Course in Sublimation” (2006), and since 2003 he has been realising the long-running project of a „museum” in inverted commas, entering into a dialogue with the work of, among others, Katarzyna Kobro, Kazimir Malevich, Roman Opałka and Stanisław Dróżdż. His works are in the collections of the National Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Museum of Art in Łódź and the Stadtmuseum in Düsseldorf.