Since the 1980s, the artist mainly focused on creating sculptures, objects, and installations, in which he often referred to the theme of memory, both personal and collective. For instance, in his Child Territories (1996-97), white cuboids with embedded flags, mounted on wooden carts, referenced a childhood game remembered by the artist. Together with his friends, young Waśko used similar handmade toys for playing war, where they represented movements of the armies. Flags, on the other hand, constituted fragments of the artist's own mythology, reflecting the countries he had visited. The same piece was also presented in a different version, created in Haifa (Child's Territory, 1997), where the flags were stuck into sand piles, also referencing childhood games.
Waśko also created several stagings of an action during which galleries and museums were becoming sites for a shared meal served by the artist. One of them was Meal for the Rich and Poor at the Wschodnia Gallery in Łódź in 1993, where guests were served red borscht in a very solemn atmosphere, conjured by hundreds of lit candles, which were horizontally inserted into the walls.
Small Rose Garden (1997-1998), an installation made out of several thousand plastic roses, evoking diverse associations, was one of the most famous works by Waśko from the 1990s. It was displayed in Łódź, Warsaw (Zachęta), Melbourne, and Bydgoszcz, each time changing its character slightly. The act of moving it from one place to another was also significant, as was illustrated in Waśko's banner installation presented at the 2nd Łódź Biennale in 2006, titled Flower Power. The banners showed photographs of Piotrkowska Street, as well as pictures taken in Jerusalem, with people's faces substituted by red dots, which made them look like red flowers, while a whole crowd resembled a field of flowers.
Personal and shared stories are also recurrent in installations, in which Waśko used old, private photographs. For instance, in his installation Passage to Anywhere (Stuttgart, 2000), the artist arranged a residential room, with furniture, a table, four chairs, and a chest of drawers. At first sight, this anonymous space was filled with a personal story, recorded on photographs found in an open suitcase, a video tape seen in the VHS player, or slides in the projector.
In the later stage of Waśko's career, the problems of media reality, shaping imagination, dreams, and everyday life, recurred. His Bedtime Stories or Nasty Bedtime Stories (2003) – cycles of paintings filled with writings (created in a labour-intensive encaustic technique) – relate to the experience of watching TV news before bedtime, as well as to childhood – memories of parents telling stories to their children as they go to sleep. As Robert C. Morgan wrote,
What Wasko is trying to achieve is a kind of oppositional irony between what his parents read to him as a child and the electronic pulse of corporate ideology that characterizes the present-day acceleration of information, manufactured to enhance the marketing appeal of advanced capitalism. **
One of the most recent series created by the artist, I am Telling You a Secret (2006), comprises large format colour prints – photographs of domestic interiors complemented by texts, formatted in the style of film credits. The texts introduce action as well as make the photographs resemble film frames. Furthermore, they highlight the degree to which the imagination of a modern spectator is shaped by the language of media, for instance film. As Grzegorz Dziamski wrote,
We enter the world of the media utopia, deterritorized world, where space was suppressed, where everything is everywhere. It is not us who have changed, it is the world around us that has changed.***
Apart from his solo practice, Ryszard Waśko is also widely known as an exceptionally active organizer of cultural life. Between the 1970s and 80s, he was responsible for a number of important initiatives, which mattered not so much for his own output, as for Polish and global intermedia movement. In 1979, the artist came up with the idea of founding an Archive of Contemporary Thought. In 1981, before the declaration of the martial law in Poland, he organized, together with a group of artists, an unprecedented event – Construction in Process. It was a completely grassroots initiative, not even entirely legal in the reality of the Polish People's Republic, and moreover based exclusively on the good will of its participants. About one hundred artists from across the world were invited to partake in it, and were only provided with room and board. The travel and shipping costs had to be covered by the artists themselves. The participants included such icons as David Rabinowitch, Carl André, Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Robert Morris, and Donald Judd.
