Włodzimierz Pawlak

Włodzimierz Pawlak (b. 1957 in Korytów near Żyrardów) is a painter, performer, poet and art theorist. In 1980-1985 he studied painting at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of Rajmund Ziemski, defending his diploma in the studio of Ryszard Winiarski; since 1986 he has been a teacher at his alma mater. While still a student, at the end of 1982, he became a member of Gruppa - one of the most important artistic formations of the 1980s (alongside Ryszard Grzyb, Paweł Kowalewski, Jarosław Modzelewski, Marek Sobczyk and Ryszard Woźniak) - taking part in almost all its exhibitions and co-editing the magazine „Oj dobrze już”.

In the Gruppa period Pawlak became known as an engaged artist, commenting on martial law with a blunt metaphor - in the cycle „Pigs” (1983), the „Flies” collages or the symbolic transformations of the five-pointed star. At the end of the 1980s his art quietens and turns towards philosophical reflection and the analysis of colour, form and texture. From this turning point his most famous, open cycles are born: the „Diaries” - canvases covered with thick white paint, on which the artist gouges vertical lines and notes dates on the edge of the stretcher, giving the passage of time a material form - as well as „Notes”, „Didactic Boards” and „Notes on Art” with references to Malevich and Strzemiński.

White became for Pawlak the supreme colour in a formal and symbolic sense - a carrier of transcendental meanings, as in Malevich. In parallel to the „Diaries” he creates objects from small, found items covered with white enamel, and in the cycle „Return to Lascaux” he reaches all the way to the sources of painting. A laureate of the Grand Prix of the painting festival in Cagnes-sur-Mer (1990) and the Jan Cybis Award (2017), he was given the retrospective „Self-portrait in Afterimages” at the Zachęta in Warsaw (2008).