Jan Wyżykowski (b.1956 Warsaw) | 1978

Jan Wyżykowski is a Polish painter and pedagogue. He graduated from the Secondary Art School in Warsaw, in 1981 he received a diploma in painting in the studio of Jan Tarasin at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. After graduation, he worked as an art and theater instructor, then as a school teacher. During this time he was preoccupied with paratheatrical activities and began writing plays. He was painting all the time, for 6 years, working every day. He made as many as 2 structuralist studies, and then (based on these studies, according to his big color theory), he made synthetic paintings of concavity and convexity, which he presented at 4 important exhibitions, thus ending his youthful period. In 1992, he had an individual exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art - Ujazdowski Castle, and in 1993 a group exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art "Dokumenty II". A year later, he took part in a group exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Bucharest, and in 1994 in an individual exhibition at the "Studio" Gallery in Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science. Between 1995 and 2003, he deliberately took a long break, slowed down and did not exhibit his works. At that time he mainly dealt with: the theory of the color channel in the retina, the theory of painting, writing dramas, and a little later he returned to performance. In 2004, he discovered reflexive perspective (at that time, the barrier of drawing was broken), he also discovered a very practical, compared to the large, so-called broken color model, thanks to which he learned how to deal with structure and more. In many undertakings he was helped by a mathematician - Cezary Suski. From 2003, he drew a lot and then painted more and more. Pausing and reflecting helped him a lot and in a short period of time he created over a dozen cycles. In 2010, he once again took up a youthful project (realization of structures based on the study from the 80's) - the New Structuralism. The year 2011, when he finished working on the structures, was a breakthrough. Gradually, Wyżykowski became aware of an extremely important problem: that creativity is not episodes in time and space, that there is no sense in dividing art into parts, that there is simply one interpretation - that of life as a whole. He also found salvation in the existence of four recognized main directions in which one can act and fulfill oneself: realism, figuration, abstraction, and structuralism. In 2006, he had a solo exhibition at "Milano" gallery, in 2010 four performances at "XXI" gallery, in 2012 another solo exhibition at "Fibak Gallery," and in 2013 a group exhibition at "Saatchi" gallery. In 2016, he published an experimental novel titled "Bullet", the third part of which is "Compendium of Painting Problems."