signed on the back on canvas: WŁODZIMIERZ PAWLAK | DZIENNIK NR 116 U | 24 x 33 | 2009
Włodzimierz Pawlak (Korytów near Żyrardów 1957, lives in Korytów) studied at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the atelier of Prof. Rajmund Ziemski, from whom he graduated in 1985. By then he was already a member of Gruppa, the most important grouping of young neo-expressionists, formed at the end of 1982 and active until 1992. Since 1986, he has been teaching painting at the Faculty of Industrial Design of his alma mater. As a member of Gruppa, he was part of the broader current of independent artistic life in the 1980s, often expressing his views on the political and social issues of the martial law period. He did this in poetry and theoretical writings (published mainly in Gruppa's magazine "Oj dobrze już"), but above all in painting. At first he reached for unambiguous symbols and metaphors as in the series "Pigs" (1983) or in paintings with the motif of a five-pointed star. A series of graduation paintings entitled. "Painted Paintings" (1985) used the procedure of layering paint. This was an original transfer and consolidation in art of the characteristic motif of painted political ha-seels on walls. He made a kind of formal volte-face in the series "Didactic Boards" (1987-1988), where the various layers of representation are transparent. Since 1989, he has been creating formally homogeneous, non-figurative "Diaries," which, in the painting version, are created by scratching rows of vertical lines in fresh white paint with a pencil. In parallel, collages with the same title are created, composed of used objects: paint tubes, shredded pencils, tickets, bills, etc. A growing theme since the mid-1990s is an interest in the art and theory of the Polish and Russian Constructivists: Katarzyna Kobro, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Kazimir Malevich and others. The artist recently exhibited a series of formal and color studies, stemming in part from these interests and in part already from his own theoretical achievements, titled "The Art of the Constructivist. The logical space of an image from 2002.
