Between 2002-2007 he studied painting at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. He graduated in 2007 from the workshop of Krzysztof Wachowiak. Between 2004-2007 he co-founded an informal group called Nuku Workshop. In 2007 his debut album Collages was released by the Ha!art Corporation. His illustrations have been featured in the popular Polish press.
Jan Dziaczkowski created paintings and collages. The style of his canvases referred to Polish Pop Art and the New Figuration of the 1970s. Paint applied flat and smooth, silhouettes drawn into the background, strong colours close to the aesthetics of the poster. Compositions created using Photoshop the artist transferred to canvas with a brush, making them visually appealing. Dziaczkowski's paintings often featured scenes and motifs taken from the surrounding reality such as social situations or reminiscences of travel, those that took place in the inner and outer world. In 2005 he made a mural entitled "Polish Embroidery" in the foyer of the Variety Theatre in Warsaw.
A significant part of Dziaczkowski's works were collages. With this somewhat forgotten technique the artist was familiar from an early age. He made decoupage and compositions from magazines cutouts together with his father. He also systematically collected interesting clippings and photographs, creating a vast pictorial repository. He executed the collages in a traditional way, using scissors, razor blades and glue. He worked mostly in small format, the size of a postcard or illustrations cut out from a book, showing extraordinary craftsmanship of "assemblage" and technical precision. The first series the artists worked on were between 2003-2007, such as Greetings From Holiday, Polish Art and Sleeping, they were released in the album Collages.
In his collages Dziaczkowski with passion resurrected the spirit and technique of Surrealists' games of cadavre exquis (from French exquisite corpse), and exposed himself to the allure of free association. The material he used to build his "hybrids" were usually old picture postcards, photographs, old illustrated magazines, books and albums found among antiques.
All of the magic of collage lies in the fact that the paper carries a story. Behind it there are people and works and this is of great significance to me. These are the objects that traveled, people kept them on a fireplace mantle, in a cabinet. Different elements combined together make up new story. Sometimes two pieces are 50 years apart, but joined together they create harmony.
In his first series of collages, Greetings from vacation Dziaczkowski used postcards from various places in Europe, sometimes archival from several dozen years ago, and reproductions of famous works of art in a postcard format. Intuition, imagination and sense of humor combined with an intelligent concept and a masterly technique resulted in a series of intriguing narrative, in which some famous art figures and characters.
We see Matisse as the mother of contemporary art, Picasso on the beach in the company of young ladies of Avignon ("Boys From Malaga Posing On The Beach"), a prevert drinking wine next to the table with the apostles consuming the last supper - painted by Leonardo da Vinci, Bonnard in the picturesque area of Ustroń, Gioconda in Zakopane, and The Luncheon on the Grass in the Yoruba tribe village or Bruegel's hunters walking down the slope directly into the Japanese landscape. Dziaczkowski played with icons and standards of art, changed contexts, disregarded the conditions of time and space, built his own world where the impossible becomes possible. He experimented, made surprising statements, showed unexpected similarities and parables, thus drawing the viewer into a fascinating journey through the collective imagination.
In his series Polish Art of the Twentieth Century, Dziaczkowski made special changes to the reproductions of famous works of art: he transformed them using a method of artistic intervention into a completely different work, he disregarded their museum status and gave them a voice (Real Ladies Speak in French), turned into a pun (Orca), modernised (Roses) and all signs show that he had a lot fun doing so (Cabbage Field). The elements of wit, surprise and visual humor play a big role in Dziaczkowski's works just as in all successful pieces of collage art.
When working on Keine Grenze Dziaczkowski used postcard presenting landmarks of European metropolis of Paris, London, Barcelona. Resorting to political fiction he created an alternative history of Europe after World War II and moved the frontiers of the Iron Curtain to Spain and Portugal. He constructed fantastic cityscapes of touristy nooks of Europe, embedding into them the silhouttes of socialist architecture cut out of Russian periodicals and books. By choosing the most classic, elegant and iconic examples of Western architecture and contrasting them with the rigid and unyielding socialist architecture and monuments, the artist sends a loud message for artistic and political freedom in a small and quiet picture. We see the Roman Di Trevi fountain against the wall of the post-communist skyscrapers, in front of the Bauhaus sits a giant statue of Lenin, a monumental Party House has grown at the Acropolis, Gaudi's Casa Mila is flanked by ugly concrete buildings, etc.
The inspiration for the next series of collages became Japanese horror movies (Japanese Monster Movies). The idyllic atmosphere of the scenes on the old Japanese postcards is dramatically disrupted by the invasion of the true monsters into their space: giant octopuses, bears, creatures of origami, King Kong, purple dinosaurs, giants, as well as dead animals and fragments of Dutch still lifes, magnified to gigantic proportions.
Old postcards from Nigeria, depicting scenes from the life of its inhabitants, became the base for the series of collages entitled Black Market of Art (2009). He assembled the elements of Jean Dubuffet's paintings: distinctive, contour decorative motifs. Dziaczkowski explained,
Motifs function as a product which is extracted from the ground, transformed into larger compositions and sold at the market by pieces or by kilograms. The 'Black market' tells the tale of an art piece that is at some point detached from its creator and his story and becomes a commodity reproduced on mouse pads, doormats.
A very unusual collage for Jan Dziaczkowski's was created in 2009 on the wall of the Warsaw club Powiśle. The name of this piece is Why Not All of Us Love Adventures? and the artist braved a 15 meter surface during its creation. The composition included, among other things, the landscapes of Yosemite Park and Alaska, the images of the inhabitants of Africa, exotic plants, and even a big reel to reel recorder, creating atmosphere straight from Jules Verne's books. Most of the photos used in his collages Dziaczkowski cut out from old issues of National Geographic that had a sentimental value to him: in his house he kept a dozen of issues of this magazine which were sent to him from Africa by his grandfather .
Another series of paintings, True And Untrue American Stories (2008-2010), is only partially connected with a journey to the US the artist took a few years ago. Dziaczkowski traveled the American continent by car and bus from Chicago to San Francisco. But as he pointed out, in the case of this project the real journey held almost no significance. For he has presented on the canvases his subjective perspective on American culture, a record of a mental journey that never was.
In his collages he included reminiscences of books, films, his fascination with American music and art, in other words a custom made American myth. These are mental collages, in which the physical world intertwines with the cultural landscape, so unexpected encounters and contexts may happen in them. Fictional characters appear alongside real people and they fit perfectly together.
Also here Dziaczkowski, as in his paper collages, crossed the boundaries of space and time. In composing the American images he adopted a formula holiday photos, which involved cropping the tourist attractions, archetypal sights and famous places like the Grand Canyon, national parks and the Universal film studio. In his piece American School, which is ironic travesty of School of Athens by Raphael, we see, set against the chipboard house, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, David Lynch, William Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, Allan Ginsberg, and Jan Dziaczkowski with a friend. In America is a Great Place to Live a woman appears among a group of tourists holding the talking tree stump from the cult TV series Twin Peaks by Lynch and in the canvas entitled Occurrence in California Indians straight out of a Western movie were pasted in.
Dziaczkowski emphasised that many of the places that he painted he has, in fact, never visited. The landscapes were copied from postcards or photos found on the Internet. The image of America he created exists on the border of reality and fiction, imagination and scenes remembered from movies or songs - a landscape of the imagination. The exhibition at the aTAK Gallery featured his art from the American series as well as a slideshow of photographs taken during his family's visit to the US, which took place in 1974 and was organised by the artist's grandfather, Bogusław Chrostowski.
Author: Ewa Gorządek, July 2010; updated in September, 2011.
Solo exhibitions:
- Keine Grenze (3), Laurence Miller Gallery, New York, VI 2010
- True and Untrue American Stories, Atak Gallery, Warsaw, IV 2010
- Japanese Monster Movies, ZPAFiSka Gallery, Cracow, I 2010
- Mountains for Warsaw, Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Warsaw, XII 2009
- Keine Grenze (2), V8, Cologne, XII 2009
- Why not all of us love adventures?, Warszawa Powiśle, Warsaw, VI 2009
- Keine Grenze, ZPAFiSka Gallery, Cracow, IX 2008
- New Collages, Piotr Nowicki Gallery, Warsaw, XII 2007
- Collages, Chłodna 25, Warsaw, VI 2007
- Polish Embroideries (mural), TR, Warsaw, XI 2005
- Greetings from Holiday, TR, Warsaw, X 2004
Selected group exhibitions:
- • Polish Contemporary Illustration Exhibition, Pigasus Gallery, Berlin, VIII 2011
- Award of the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cracow, V 2011
- You Can’t Get There From Here, Camera Club Of New York, New York, IX 2010
- The Summer of Youth, Zachęta Gallery, Warsaw, VI 2010
- Modernisation, Photoespana, Aula Cultural Universidad Abierta, Cuenca, VI 2010
- Illustration 2010, Sinfonia Varsovia, Warsaw, IV 2010
- Bielska Jesień - Painting Biennale, BWA, Bielsko Biała, XI 2009
- Festival of Young Art Przeciąg, Pomeranian Dukes’ Castle, Szczecin, XI 2009
- Renoma/Reflections of Wroclaw, Arup Phase 2 Gallery, London, X 2009
- Nieodkryte/Niewypowiedziane, Nowy Teatr, Warsaw, V 2009
- Young?Young!, Angle Art Contemporain, Saint-Paul-Troix-Chateaux, III 2009
- In His Window I See Everything, Witryna, Warsaw, XII 2008
- Painting Attraction, Witryna, Warsaw, VII 2008
- Red Eyes Effect, Centre For Contemporary Art, Warsaw, V 2008
- Fish Eye, Biennale of Contemporary Art, BWA, Ustka, V 2008
- Concrete Legacy, Polish Institute, Rome, V 2008
- Polish Venus, Photomonth, Estery St 12, Cracow, V 2008
- Bielska Jesień - Painting Biennale, BWA, Bielsko Biała, XI 2007
- 8th edition of E. Geppert competition, BWA, Wrocław, X 2007
- One of Them Must Know, Ogrodowa, Warsaw, X 2007
- Young from Warsaw, Center for Art Propaganda, Łódź, III 2007
- Young European Creators, Montrouge, Paris, IX 2006
- Las Lanzas, Fine Arts Academy, Warsaw, XII 2005
- We Will Make It Somehow, Piotr Nowicki Gallery, Warsaw, XI 2005
- 10/1, Faculty of Fine Arts, Cuenca, V 2005
- Merci pour les fruits, Kuluary Gallery, Warsaw, XI 2004
- Provence, Fabryka Trzciny Art Center, Warszawa, II 2004
