Paweł Kowalewski (born 1958) – painter, intermedia artist, retired professor of the Academy of Fine Arts, member and founder of the legendary Gruppa. From 1978 to 1983, he studied at the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, graduating with distinction from the studio of Stefan Gierowski. In 1982, he founded the legendary Gruppa, one of the key artistic formations of the 1980s. He also co-authored the magazine “Oj Dobrze już,” published by the collective. From 1985 to 2023, he lectured at the Faculty of Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he was awarded the title of professor in 2019. Kowalewski’s work is diverse in genre – it encompasses painting on canvas and paper, photography, sculpture, NFTs, installations, and ready-mades. Characteristic of his style are the conceptual-Dadaist commentaries and titles with which he has accompanied his works since the beginning of his artistic career. Each piece in his oeuvre carries profound meaning, commenting on reality, referencing literary texts, personal lives, or historical pages. The artist continues to closely observe the absurdities and threats of contemporary reality, unafraid to ask difficult questions through his art. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum Jerke in Recklinghausen, the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, the Museum of Art in Łódź, the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the NS-Dokumentationszentrum in Munich, the State Art Gallery in Sopot, the Elektrownia Centre for Contemporary Art in Radom, the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the Znaki Czasu Centre for Contemporary Art in Toruń, the MuFo Museum of Photography in Krakow, the Artist’s House in Tel Aviv, the Polish Institute in Berlin, and the Isy Brachot Gallery in Brussels. His work is included in many important collections, including the National Museum in Warsaw, the National Museum in Krakow, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, the Jerke Museum in Recklinghausen, the Łódź Art Museum, the District Museum in Bydgoszcz, the Upper Silesian Museum in Bytom, the collection of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, the ING Polish Art Foundation, the Starak Family Foundation, and private collections such as Cartier and Isa Brachot.
A person becomes immortal by living in our memory, which is the place where immortality is stored. This is how I remember Andrzej Mroczek – a wonderful, smiling man. I remember how, during martial law, he became fascinated by the art of the fledgling Gruppa. He welcomed us, young artists and students, to his gallery in Lublin – the only one where exhibitions were allowed during the boycott of state institutions. Mroczek would remove a rubber band from a plastic box and pull out slides depicting paintings: mine, Ryszard Woźniak, Ryszard Grzyb, Małgorzata Rittersschild, Ewa Piechowska, and others. He would look at them and burst with joy, but also, as a lover of conceptual art, exclaim with gleeful indignation that we wanted to destroy painting. Although we protested slightly that that wasn’t our intention, after all—perhaps painting could also be conceptual art, since anything is possible in it?
That’s how I remember him, and that’s how I want to portray him. To show that he was a light in this city, a professional who showed us a very original path, an inspiration, but also simply a human being, with his unique smile.
The way he is commemorated aims to symbolically incorporate Andrzej Mroczek into the fabric of the city to which he gave so much—into the street and the place where he once ran his gallery. I don’t want to do this through a banal bronze plaque or brass memento. I want to summon him with the colors of the rainbow and the light needed to view slides. The kind of slides he once viewed our paintings on.
