Antoni Mikołajczyk

Multimedia artist specializing in photography, painting, video art, and installation. Born in 1939 in Siemanowice, died in 2000 in Łódź.

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Antoni Mikołajczyk at the exhibition Kuźnia, the last show of ZERO-61 group, photo: Andrzej Różycki, courtesy of CCA Toruń

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Antoni Mikołajczyk

He was a lecturer since early 1990s and in 2000, he became a full professor at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, where he taught in 1972-1977 and in 1997-1998. He was a member of the Association of Polish Artists and Designers (ZPAP) since 1968, while in 1970, he joined the Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF).

Between 1962 and 1967, he studied at at the Fine Arts Department of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (he received a diploma in painting from the workshop of Bronisław Kierzkowski). He later worked there until 1969. In 1963, he co-organized the photo collective Rytm, which was in a competition with the group Zero 61. He was also active in the Pętla Creative Student Film Club (1963-69), where he realised experimental films, and later in the interdisciplinary group Krąg. At the presentations of the latter collective, Mikołajczyk showed his oil paintings and photographs. Between 1966/67 and 1969, he worked in the group Zero 61, and took part in their last exhibition at the so called 'old forge' in Toruń (1969). Objects found on site were used together with prepared photographs, or, more precisely, photographic objects, as a form of confrontation with the notion of 'artistic photography,' which was supposed to be challenged and questioned.

A to Z of Art & Technology

During that time, Mikołajczyk specialised in colour photography of metaphorical (Multiple Portrait, 1967) and documentary (Windmill) nature, as well as in photojournalism (A Grey Day). His painting works followed the convention of allusive abstraction. 1970 saw the foundation of the Workshop of Film Form, to which Mikołajczyk belonged. The artist participated in various interventions and scandals. At the exhibition Fotografowie poszukujący (Photographers' Quest), he presented several objects (A Shirt, Nude, An Exiting Person), created with the use of the traditional photographic form, and at the same time transcending its boundaries. In 1973, he took part in Akcja Warsztat (Action Workshop) at the Łódź Art Museum, where he presented Construction – a spatial installation based on light—a technique which became a trademark of his future oeuvre.

In the 1970s, he produced analytical works, which explored the problems of image relations, image's relationship with a line and the borderline between photography and film (Anatomy, 1974). He also created video installations (Vertical Registration, 1976). He was interested in the notion of a total registration in photography, as well as in describing a given place and transmitting the reality of one medium (for instance photography) to another (sculpture). Moreover, he explored so-called registrations of light, which he investigated as a geometric, rather than an expressive form (also in the form of colour photographs), while recording images from the road. He took part in the famous exhibition Konstrukcja w procesie (Construction in Process, Łódź, 1981), organized by Ryszard Waśko, and was also the commissioner of the accompanying exhibition Falochron – Sztuka polska 1970-1980 (Breakwater – Polish Art 1970-1980).

An Outline History Of Polish Video Art

During the martial law period, from 1984 to approximately 1989, he led an underground gallery Punkt Konsultacyjny (Consultation Point), which hosted gatherings, discussions, and exhibitions. It operated as an independent gallery and was associated with Łódź's community Kultura Zrzuty. In 1985, he took part in the show Prozess und Konstruktion in Munich, where he presented an installation referencing his piece Construction I from 1973. In the 1980s and 1990s, he cooperated with the Mała Gallery ZPAF-CCA in Warsaw and the Łódź-based Wschodnia Gallery, and later with the FF Gallery, which held his solo shows and where he also worked as an exhibition commissioner, responsible for, e.g. Utopia i rzeczywistość. Międzynarodowa prezentacja idei (Utopia and Reality: International Presentation of Ideas) at the Wschodnia Gallery. 1987/88 saw the prestigious exhibition Antoni Mikołajczyk. Licht und Raum at the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg. His light installations from 1980s and 1990s combined the traditions of Constructivism and Minimalism (Real and Ephemeral, 1992) with different interpretations of light, which could either co-exist with a sculpture or compete with it, thus creating a new quality (The Field of Utopia, 1990). He also used ready-made objects (e.g. Simultaneous Shadow, 1990). Towards the end of his versatile creative path concerned with light sculptures, he worked with forms which were seductive through their impossibility of existence, and emphasised the mysterious nature of light (Touching Space, 1997). In 1997, he wrote about his oeuvre:

When creating new fields of artistic penetration and spread them across subsequent areas of the ungraspable and undefinable artistic utopia, we reach a moment when every axiom loses its sense.

His artistic output evolved ever since his Modernist activities associated with the Zero 61 group, through the traditions of the Łódź-based Workshop of Film Form, to the later stage falling on the 1980s and 90s, dominated by conceptualism and the perception of photography as a modern art form, as stemming from the Bauhaus traditions. His works belong to the collections of: National Museum in Warsaw, National Museum in Wrocław, Łódź Art Museum, Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, Regional Museum in Toruń, Museum of the Lublin Region in Zielona Góra, Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Museum of Modern Art in Hünfeld, Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Folkwang Museum in Essen, and Sammlung Hoffmann in Berlin.

Author: Krzysztof Jurecki, Łódź Art Museum, June 2004, transl. AM, April 2016

mutlimedia installations

light sculpture

Workshop of Film Form

wschodnia gallery

zero 61