Witold-K Kaczanowski

Witold-K, properly Wit Leszek Kaczanowski (1932, Warsaw – 2025), was a painter, sculptor, graphic artist and photographer. He spent his childhood on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital in Tworki, of which his father was the director, an experience that later returned in his art. He studied at the Faculty of Graphic Art of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (diploma 1955/56), under Wojciech Fangor and Henryk Tomaszewski among others.

In 1964 he left on a scholarship to Paris. It was a one-way journey, for, having smuggled out a manuscript for the Paris „Kultura”, he was for years unable to return to the country. In the Paris bohemia he became friends with the poet Jacques Prévert, who wrote a poem about his art, and through him he met Pablo Picasso (who sketched his portrait). In 1968/69 he moved to the USA. He lived successively in New York, Los Angeles, Santa Fe (next to Fangor), Houston, and from 1980 in Denver, while also keeping a studio in Warsaw.

Witold-K's work is above all an expressive, „unsettling” painting, in which the motif of the „little man”, at once sad and funny, recurs, as well as the cycle „People”, imbued with the theme of loneliness and the human condition. He was the first Pole to be given a retrospective at the Sotheby's auction house in Amsterdam (2007, 163 works), and earlier at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. He is also the author of the largest ceiling painting in Poland (408 m²), in the Oświęcim Cultural Centre.