Ryszard Grzyb

Ryszard Grzyb (b. 1956) is a painter, draughtsman, poet and graphic designer - one of the leading representatives of the so-called new expression of the 1980s. He comes from a working-class family; after the secondary school of fine arts in Katowice he studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław (1976-1979, the studio of Zbigniew Karpiński), and then at the Faculty of Painting of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, where he defended his diploma in the studio of Rajmund Ziemski. It was there that he met Paweł Kowalewski, Jarosław Modzelewski, Włodzimierz Pawlak, Marek Sobczyk and Ryszard Woźniak, with whom in 1982 he formed the legendary Gruppa.

With Gruppa he exhibited and carried out actions in 1982-1992; he was also a co-founder and publisher of its magazine „Oj dobrze już”, where he placed theoretical texts, drawings and poems. His work of that period - expressive, ironic, sometimes downright obscene - belonged to the current of the „new savages” (Neue Wilde) and constituted a reaction to the reality of martial law. In the 1980s he painted mainly large-format „papers” - tempera compositions on cardboard, full of colour, symbolism and references to mass culture and to the condition of contemporary man.

At the beginning of the 1990s his painting moved from expression towards more decorative compositions, in which recurring, simplified motifs began to dominate - a bird, a rhinoceros, a rabbit - arranged into multicoloured mosaics. In 2004 he began his long-running poetic project „Aerial Sentences”. A laureate of the Jan Cybis Award (2010), he remains one of the most recognisable painters of his generation, combining the element of colour with reflection on the psychology of man and society.