Roman Owidzki

Roman Owidzki (1912, Ostrowy near Łódź - 2009, Warsaw) was a painter, graphic artist, illustrator and stage designer, a professor of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and one of the most important Polish creators of abstract art. Before he took up painting, he studied the exact sciences at the University of Warsaw (1931-34) - this experience gave his later work an element of order and a tendency towards forms derived from the organic world. His painting studies at the Academy of Fine Arts were interrupted by the war; as a defender of the Modlin fortress he ended up in the POW camp in Murnau, where he co-created stage sets for the camp theatre and - as he himself maintained - „was born” as an artist. He received his diploma only in 1955, already being a teacher at the school.

From 1956 Owidzki ran a studio of solids and planes at the Academy of Fine Arts, later transformed into the „Studio of the Knowledge of Visual Activities and Structures”, which contributed decisively to the development of abstract art in Poland; he treated teaching „as co-creation”. He was one of the co-founders of the Galeria Foksal and a participant in its first exhibition, organised together with Henryk Stażewski in 1966; he also collaborated with Marian Bogusz's Krzywe Koło Gallery.

At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s Owidzki's work moved away from figuration towards non-figurative art, to which he remained faithful until the end of his life. The most emblematic are his monochrome reliefs: onto the canvas he applied elements of plywood, metal and papier-mâché, forming ordered arrangements resembling biological forms of life, usually kept in earth colours. A laureate of the Jan Cybis Award (2007) and the C.K. Norwid Award, he left works in, among others, the collections of the National Museum in Warsaw, the Museum of Art in Łódź and the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.