Oil on linen canvas, dimensions of the work: 30 x 30 cm, signed St Kortyka 2016 on the back, in a wooden frame
Inscribed and signed on the back: Stanislaw Ryszard KORTYKA "Tower 2016 III ( GRAY) 2016 oil 30 x 30
Stanislaw Ryszard Kortyka
Born in 1943. Studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts, now the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw. Graduated with honors in painting and architectural painting design in the studios of Prof. Zbigniew Karpinski and Associate Professor Alfons Mazurkiewicz in 1969. He participated in more than 140 group exhibitions at home and abroad. He presented painting and drawing at 30 solo exhibitions. He is a titular professor. He led the graduating painting studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw. Until 2018, he led the graduating painting studio at the Institute of Visual Arts, Faculty of Arts, University of Zielona Gora. In 2004, awarded the Main Prize of the President of the City of Wroclaw at the Lower Silesian Art Exhibitions (painting). In 2006, he was awarded the Prize of the President of the City of Szczecin at the XXI. Festival of Polish Contemporary Painting in Szczecin. In 2014, he received the Silver Medal for Merit to Culture "Gloria Artis". Works in the collections of the National Museum in Wroclaw and Szczecin, the Museum of Architecture in Wroclaw, the District Museum and BWA in Sandomierz, the BWA in Przemyśl, the Museum of Southern Podlasie in Biała Podlaska, the Gallery of Contemporary Sacred Art in Kielce, the Kutsch Gallery in Salzburg and in private collections at home and abroad.
He has published three collections of poetry in the Ossolineum Publishing House.
The work of painter-poet Stanislaw Ryszard Kortyka stands out significantly in contemporary Polish art. His works, arranged in cycles almost every time, often intrigue us with a tone of meditation, which appears after the tumult of events (and sometimes, as in 1980 to them parallel). These paintings often conceal evocations of moods in places especially important to the artist (such as the Sandomierz region with its scenic vistas, Podlasie with its profusion of field structures, Jura full of phenomenal rocks). But already in embryo they accommodate vectors of reaching out with thoughts again and again, beyond the surrounding crumbs towards the infinity of repetition and disappearance. "Along the way," as it were, these arrows also wander to the various traditions of art and literature behind them. This is largely because Kortyka belongs to an exclusive group of those visual artists who are also original poets or writers and launch far-reaching metaphors in both regions. In Kortyka's case, this may include the special role of stones, brought out not without eavesdropping on the tone of Zbigniew Herbert's poem. The artist is bound to the spirit of Wroclaw structuralism by a very specific, disciplined reductionist approach to art. And the motifs appearing in various combinations in his works are often surrounded by a post-catastrophic enigma. It permeates all of these: blue boundless horizons, stubble or ducts of plowed fields, ashen terrains, constellations of stones or concretes, rags and sheets of paper, stapled fascines, streams and paperwork. Only exceptionally can it be vibrant sprouting potatoes, birds guarding the scenes or green bushes. All the motifs are tied together by an atmosphere of vision, aided by a sense of escaping into nothingness by the illusion of space and projections of light. Working in the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges, Kortyka mixes different tropes and mediates between them. And the results of this work are labyrinths of ordinariness in extraordinary images.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his creative work, a comprehensive monograph of Stanislaw Ryszard Kortyka's artistic achievements has been published by the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw.
Andrzej Kostolowski
