Jan Dobkowski

Jan Dobkowski (born June 8, 1942 in Łomża) - Polish artist; He deals with painting, drawing, creating spatial arrangements. Cartoonist, author of the action and spatial installation in the interiors and in the landscape.

He was born on June 8, 1942 in Lomza, Poland. He studied painting in the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1962-1968. He defended his diploma in the prof. John Cybis. Student prof. Juliusz Studnicki and prof. John Cybis, in whose studio he prepared his diploma (in 1968). In his fourth year of study he became friends with Jerzy Zieliński, with whom two years later, during the preparation for the exhibition of both artists, announced the existence of a Neo-Neo-Neo group.

He graduated from the Secondary School of Fine Arts in Warsaw and in 1962 began his studies at the Painting Faculty of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Student prof. Juliusz Studnicki and prof. John Cybis, in whose studio he prepared his diploma (in 1968).

Laureate of the award of the Minister of Culture and Art for the dissemination of artistic creation (1970), scholarship recipient of the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York (1972). In 1970 he received a gold medal and a prize at the Golden Grape Symposium in Zielona Góra, and in 1978, Cyprian Norwid for the best show of the year. In 1994 he was honored with the. John Cybis for the whole of creation.

The works of Dobkowski are included in collections including the Museum of Art in Łódź, the National Museum in Warsaw, the National Museum in Wroclaw, the National Museum in Poznan, the R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and private collections in Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, France.

Jan Dobkowski, a student of prominent post-Impressionist Jan Cybis, was clearly opposed to his studies at the time at the Polish art colleges, where he emphasized the nuanced colors and thick layers of textures. As early as 1965, Dobkowski painted paintings with smooth, shiny surfaces, representing flatly laid and silhouetted colored patches, shapes of people and objects. This synthetic approach to the material also affected the pallet limitation to a few purely uniform colors, without varying the tonality. As he was saying, he did not intend to "talk" and put forward his own proposal for painting language. His plane images referred to the aesthetics of backing. The Doblowski line, extremely precise and pure, played a large role, which would also dominate his drawing from the beginning as a complement to painting. In 1963 he performed, apart from the university program, a series of 65 erotic ink drawings and a series of linologues illustrating the Apollinaire's Apprentice. In 1966 he proposed for the annual exhibition of students of the Academy of Fine Arts at the Warsaw University of Technology a series of polygonal images, which, however, were rejected by the professors committee of the Academy.

In the fourth year of study, Dobkowski became friends with Jerzy Zieliński (Jurrym), who also rebelled against painting in a pseudo-impressionist style. In 1967, during the preparations for the exhibition of both artists at the Warsaw Medical Club, they officially announced the formation of the Neo-Neo-Neo group, although their NEO-NEO-NEO painting began to form two years earlier. The name itself suggested that nothing in the play was really new. Dobkowski presented at the exhibition images of contrasting colors (green, reds, yellows, blues) with silhouette compositions of model figures, often multiplexed (eg Twinkle Model, 1966). Dobkowski and Zieliński set out together until 1970 (among others in Lublin and Katowice), when the NEO-NEO-NEO group ceased to exist as a result of differences between artists.

In 1968, Dobkowski took part in the exhibition "Secesja-Secesja?" In the Contemporary Gallery in Warsaw, which caused great interest in the media and among critics. After the success of this exhibition, his paintings were on the prestigious presentation of Polish contemporary painting. Sources and searches in Paris. Soon the Guggenheim Museum in New York bought his canvas Double Girl (1968), the first red-green painting by Dobkowski. A whole series of paintings of such color was created a year later, painted in a standardized format of 200 x 150 cm. Green silhouettes appeared in various situations, red silhouettes of male and female characters, the latter most often with luscious shapes, caricaturely grown. Women with multiple breasts, women with the form of apples or pears had a powerful charge of eroticism and sensuality. Some forms in the pictures of Dobkowski turned smoothly into another, the female breast became a good apple, the heart sperm, and the spine and ribs organic, flabby structure. Green suggested nature, spontaneous vitality, life. These images became the starting point for many spatial activities and subsequent series of images.

A year later, the extension of the summer took place, in which the artist used red-green figures cut from the board and placed in a snowy landscape. Also in 1969 a similar action took place in the factory hall "Polfa", where the background for the suspended in the flat, Dobkowski flat were machines.

During his stay in the USA in 1972, in connection with the Kosciuszko Foundation scholarship, Dobkowski exhibited at Bodley Gallery statues cut from colored Plexiglas plates. This was his next experiment of building forms in space, this time with another material and using a different color, more synthetic. The artist has no longer returned to the red-green composition, has begun new reflections on color and ways to extract depth.

Around the mid 70s, the style of Dobkowski is changing. The artist then drew a series of landscapes, romantic drawings, without such human characters and eroticism. Dobkowski's drawing resembles a network of intricately tangled lines, thin as hair, flowing with dense planes, filling the entire plane. Its smooth line develops almost organically, creating a homogeneous whole on the board, which emanates the artist's built atmosphere. During this time, black and white images are also generated starting with the drawing. The first painting painted in white and black was the Canvas of the Sorrow of 1974. Later, chromatic images were created, usually brought only to reds and blues. "Red is alive, and blue seems to me the most distant and eternal."

Reflections on the line resulted in hundreds of almost abstract drawings and outdoor actions, such as Wind Drawing (1974), Burning Square (Osieki 1979) and Riverbank (Łomża 1980). Images were also reduced to the free lines, among others. Cycle of nine large green-blue canvases Or - from 1981. They can be read as abstract or symbolic. Two dynamic forms pulsing in the field filled with lines can be characters or pure life energy, and the relationship between them is a record of a relationship or a history of undetermined existence. The cycle was born after the birth of the son and is dedicated to the conceived child - presents the seedlings gradually changing their size.
 
Around me I see a great web, I'm in it, and the real thing - by the fact that it's made up of lines - is becoming abstract, the line is the most important.
In 1978 Zachęta Gallery organizes the first large retrospective exhibition of Dobkowski's works, which depicts paintings, drawings and spatial forms created between 1963 and 1978. The painter receives the Art Critic Award for them. C. K. Norwid. At the beginning of the 80s, Dobkowski began to paint more and more, with traces of landscapes, objects, symbols, and even scenes.

Works created in subsequent years are largely a pessimistic reminiscence of martial law. Symbols such as V, national flag, and cross mark appear in them. The artist almost does not exhibit, his paintings are removed by censorship (Gallery 72 in Chełm, 1983). In the years 1984-85, among others. Treny's cycle, in which the dark bands found the structure of colorful bands, and a triptych devoted to Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, which consists of works: bad hunch, saddles and funeral. Next years (1985-89) fill the journey - to France, Italy, Spain, South America, Greece, Israel and Finland. During this time, Icar painting cycle and drawing - Genesis.

Dobkowski returns to the plexiglass, from which he now creates colorful spatial toys for his daughter. Together with her portraits, they consist of an exhibition "Marianna" (daughter's name), presented at the Krytyki Gallery in Warsaw in 1979.

In the years 1980-1981 Dobkowski created cycles of paintings and drawings - Erotikon, Hope and Darkness, or - or. The latter artist comments as follows:
"It is a cycle in which drawing is a process of self-consciousness of the creation of my art world in which a significant place occupies the process of the creation of the Earth and the cosmos, and then the emergence of cultures and human emotions." Creation is a continuous creation and for me Genesis is a reflection on the existing and eternal As far as possible I try to travel a lot to get to know the world of nature and different cultures, because both are inspirations for my art. "
In the 1990s, Dobkowski created the following series: Sounds (1994), Simultaneous Pictures (1995-96), Rio Carnival (since 1997), Nocturne (1998) and the Watercolor Universe series, launched in 1992. Simultaneous images deserve special attention, which is a kind of summation of the artist's achievements, where each of the paintings refers to another period of his work, other solutions and motifs.

Dobkowski immediately developed a plastic language that coincided with the mental-moral revolution of the sixties, called counter-culture. Art was in such a way, helping man overcome the pollution of civilization, liberating him from the oppression of prudish culture. It was meant to trigger the spontaneity of biological energies that bring happiness and make it a part of the Universe. This program has remained loyal to this day; His youthful intuition is getting stronger as time goes by, as the mastery of the formal mastery is deepened, able to capture in the plastic form the crazy ideas that come to youth in their youth. In the commentary given to the "General Review" in June 1986, Dobkowski confessed:
Nature is for me a matter of space, of a certain consistency of the world - it is earth and air, clouds, fire and water, it is a constant transformation of nature. I thought, in nature, there is a bed that can make my living art, so in the paintings I tried to show first of all the human being, naked, without attributes of culture or civilization: woman and man in their eternal gestures. Strong man desires nature and is good. "
 
Author: Ewa Gorządek, Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, November 2008.
https://hisour.com/artist/jan-dobkowski/