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.