Zbigniew Maciej Dowgiałło

Zbigniew Maciej Dowgiałło (b. 1961 in Gdańsk) is a painter, draughtsman, computer graphic artist and creator of films, stage designer and screenwriter. He began his studies at the Faculty of Interior Architecture of the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk (1980-82), and continued them at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, where in 1986 he received his diploma in painting in the studio of Stefan Gierowski. He had his first exhibition as early as 1979 at the Student Gallery of the Gdańsk University of Technology.

Already during his studies, from 1982, together with Wojciech Tracewski he co-created a new direction in Polish painting - the New Expressionism (also called Neue Wilde, the „Young Savages”); they called themselves „the first Polish savages”. He was one of the most talked-about, most iconoclastic and most active artists of the decade, working under the care of the curator Andrzej Bonarski and taking part in the most important exhibitions of the „Expression of the 1980s” - in the leading alternative galleries, as well as at the Zachęta and the National Museum in Warsaw. At first he created dynamic, exuberant compositions of sharp colouring, including the notorious „The Sinking of a Raft Full of Communists” (1987).

His large-format, intensely coloured paintings provoke and arouse extreme reactions. In the following decades Dowgiałło developed work combining traditional easel painting with digital techniques and 3D design, formulating his own currents („Cosmic Baroque”, „sublimation realism”); he is also the author of film screenplays and visions. His works are in the collections of the National Museum in Warsaw, the Museum of Art in Łódź and the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.