Marian Warzecha

Marian Warzecha (b. 1930 in Kraków) is a painter, creator of reliefs and conceptual activities - one of the most important representatives of conceptual art in Poland. He studied painting (1948-1950) and stage design (1952-1957, diploma under Andrzej Stopka) at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, and in parallel ethnography and art history at the Jagiellonian University. In 1957 he co-created the reactivated Kraków Group and took part in the 2nd Exhibition of Modern Art in Warsaw.

After a short episode of Informel - „drawing” with trickles of freely poured paint on a horizontally laid canvas - from the end of the 1950s Warzecha created geometric collages and reliefs kept in a uniform white. Into them he introduced handwritten notes, graphs, drawings and, in time, also ready-made objects. In 1968, in collaboration with a mathematician, he worked out his own artistic system, the result of his research into the connections between art and science (his reading of Kuratowski's set theory was important to him).

Throughout his creative life Warzecha has remained an intimate and distinct artist, focused on the restrained documentation of his reflection on the essence of art; he was also the initiator of the conversatorium „Art - Religion - Science” (1983-89). He has exhibited solo at, among others, the Zabriskie Gallery and Bonino Gallery in New York, the Galleria L'Obelisco in Rome and Gallery 72 in Chełm; his work was recalled by the intimate exhibition „Open Set” at the National Museum in Kraków.