Stanisław Dróżdż

Stanisław Dróżdż (1939, Sławków – 2009, Wrocław) was the most outstanding Polish concrete poet and one of the leading artists of the post-war avant-garde. He spent his childhood in Sosnowiec, and from 1955 he became associated for over half a century with Wrocław, where he studied Polish philology. He received his diploma in 1979 on the basis of a book he himself compiled and published, „Concrete Poetry. A Selection of Polish Texts and Documentation from 1967-1977”.

Although his work is most often classed as conceptualism, the author himself regarded himself above all as a poet. „I feel myself a poet. More a poet than an artist”, he said: „my poetry is closer to the exact sciences than to art”. The fundamental source of his inspiration was language, and alongside it mathematics and other sign systems.

From 1967 Dróżdż described his works with the term „concept-shapes” (pojęciokształty): from the shapes of concepts, which are realised at the moment of their spatial forming. They are at once text and image. As he wrote, „concept-shapes are substantive-formal, self-analysing codifiers of reality, integrating science and art, poetry and the visual arts”. He summed up this principle aptly: „In concrete poetry the form is determined by the content, and the content by the form. Traditional poetry describes an image. Concrete poetry writes with the image”. Among his most famous realisations are „beginningend” (1971), the composition „between” spread across an entire room (1977) and „Alea iacta est”, based on probability theory.

He made his debut in 1968 at the now non-existent Wrocław Gallery „Pod Moną Lizą”, and from 1971 he collaborated with the Galeria Foksal in Warsaw. He took part in over 300 solo and group exhibitions in Poland and abroad, representing Poland at the most important presentations of concrete poetry and conceptual art, including „sound text – concrete poetry – visual texts” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1970-1972), at the 50th Venice Art Biennale (2003), where in the Polish Pavilion he showed „Alea iacta est”, and at „Beyond Geometry. Experiments in Form, 1940s-1970s” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2004). A laureate of the award of the Nowosielski Foundation (2001), he died in 2009, a few weeks before the opening of his great Wrocław retrospective „beginningend”. He remains a world-renowned artist of the borderland of poetry and the visual arts, and one of the most original minds of the Polish avant-garde.