Paweł Kowalewski

Education and Early Career

Between 1978 and 1983, Paweł Kowalewski studied at the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he graduated with honors from the studio of Stefan Gierowski. Since 1985, he has been a lecturer at the Faculty of Design at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, where in 2019 he was awarded the title of professor.

He was the founder of Gruppa, the most famous Polish artistic formation of the 1980s, created together with Ryszard Grzyb, Jarosław Modzelewski, Włodzimierz Pawlak, Marek Sobczyk, and Ryszard Woźniak. Gruppa’s activities can be described as a rebellion against academicism and post-avant-garde attitudes in art, as well as a protest against censorship and repression by the communist authorities during the period of martial law imposed in 1981.

Kowalewski perceived the reality of that difficult period in the People’s Republic of Poland as absurd and grotesque. From 1984 to 1989, as part of Gruppa’s ephemeral magazine “Oj dobrze już,” which featured poems, statements, commentary, sketches, and drawings, he wrote satirical texts, including under the pseudonym of the imaginary American journalist Sharm Yarn. In this way, he aimed to expose the uncertainty of Polish art criticism, comment on the neglect of unique phenomena occurring in Poland at that time, and mock attempts to steer culture according to top-down political paradigms.

Artistic Attitude and the Gruppa Era

Kowalewski’s creative approach is rooted in the post-conceptual tradition, with ideas incorporated into his works in the form of textual commentary and elaborate, poetic titles placed on fabric ribbons. Together with Gruppa members, he organized radical painting actions and recitals based on the poetics of absurdity, including in the legendary Dziekanka studio at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (e.g., the 1987 recital “A Cold Deer in Jam” about Lenin in Poronin).

His art can be described as expressive, autobiographical, and drawing from personal experience and literary context. The artist has developed his own language of expression, considering the message more important than the form or medium. Recalling that period, he says: “Without words, we did not exist.”

In 1980s Poland, there was a characteristic intersection of social and artistic processes, with artists acting as researchers of the contemporary reality, revising moral and worldview values. Kowalewski and Gruppa’s work emerged in parallel with, or even ahead of, some currents in German art, such as the Neue Wilde. Rebellion and the search for identity defined the attitudes of artists in both countries at that time.

The Concept of Personal Art

From the very beginning of his career, Paweł Kowalewski developed the concept of “personal, or private, art.” His inspirations remained closely linked to his life but also addressed issues that placed the viewer in a universal context. This oscillation between the experience of individuality and universality has accompanied his practice to this day and constitutes its constant character.

Around 1986, Kowalewski created his first sculptural works—small objects encased in glass display cases like relics. Works such as “The Right Ear of the High Priest’s Servant” and “The Stone That Became Bread” offered critical commentary on the hostile aesthetics of everyday life. In the same sharp, expressive, and nonchalant tone, Kowalewski painted works that even provoked censorship from the Church. During the 1980s, his artistic activity was considered by the authorities of the totalitarian state as art escaping the official circuit. The “Psalms” series, inspired by the Psalms of David translated by Czesław Miłosz, was accused—subjectively—of blasphemy. Each work referenced specific biblical quotes and reflected the dilemmas of a young artist: Should I leave or stay in the country? Where does the truth lie? Does justice exist?

A culminating event of this period was participation in Documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987, where works by Barbara Kruger and Joseph Beuys were also presented. Together with Gruppa, Kowalewski organized a collaborative painting action of a large-format canvas entitled “Kuda Gierman.”

Key Works and Turning Point

Selected works by Kowalewski, after numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad, have become icons of 1980s art, such as “Mon cheri Bolscheviq” (shown at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow), the sculpture “Tragic Opacity of Necessity” (a hermetically sealed aquarium with a piece of beef liver submerged in water), or “Goodbye My Darlings” (a painting now in the collection of renowned art critic Anda Rottenberg).

A pivotal moment in Kowalewski’s practice came in 1989, when, together with Gruppa, he initiated a collaborative painting action in front of a Solidarity polling station in Warsaw. The work, titled “The Voice of Nature for Solidarity,” symbolically capped their group career. The artists, who began the 1980s as novices, ended their collective activity as classics of the past decade. Thanks to their numerous achievements, in 1992, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art organized a large, retrospective exhibition summarizing Gruppa’s output.

The systemic transformation and the end of Gruppa marked changes in Kowalewski’s artistic means. In the early 1990s, he began creating analytical, structural canvases. In his paintings from this period, he juxtaposed nineteenth-century wallpaper patterns with black and white stripes—a sardonic vision of the future. After presenting his latest series “Fin de siècle” at Warsaw’s Appendix Gallery in 1992, Paweł Kowalewski was represented by French gallerist Isy Brachot, as the only Pole after Roman Opałka. His works were shown at the Brachot Gallery in Brussels alongside a retrospective of Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux.

With the “Fin de siècle” series, Kowalewski concluded his work with the medium of painting, focusing henceforth on interdisciplinary and performative works, which became some of his most socially engaged projects.

Art and Social Commentary

A pivotal experience was visiting the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, where he saw the sign “Europeans only.” In 2010, this inspired the “Forbidden/NIE WOLNO” series, documenting prohibitions and orders recorded during the artist’s travels around the world. Reproductions of the “NIE WOLNO” series appeared as postcards during Kowalewski’s performance actions at the 2011 Venice Biennale, where he would insert his directive cards among tourist postcards at souvenir stands.

The “NIE WOLNO” project also functioned as a series of lightboxes accompanying the installation “Simulator of Totalitarianism” at the Propaganda Gallery in 2012. In this technical apparatus constructed by the artist, worlds of oppression and drastic images of crimes from totalitarian times were juxtaposed with scenes of normal life (e.g., a bartender competition in Italy, a family stroll in Milan, a classical music concert). Entering the simulator, the viewer became a participant in tragic events, as their photograph, taken before entering the cabin, was randomly inserted into the projection frames.

Materials used to produce the “Simulator of Totalitarianism”—the smell of rubber, tar paper, darkness, and isolation—transported visitors to situations associated with oppression, so they could test their reactions and behaviors in simulated states of threat. As the artist explains: “Art must be uncomfortable; it cannot soothe. It should address the unresolvable.”

A New Beginning

The 2000s in Kowalewski’s practice marked a turn towards the ethos of memory and the personal process of forgetting and erasure. In 2015, in Tel Aviv, the artist presented the series “Strength and Beauty,” focusing on the subject of subjective memory in the context of collective experience. The concept was rooted in a deeply personal story and became a pretext to talk about a unique generation of women. The series of large-format, vanishing portraits depicted so-called ‘Polish Mothers’ marked by the trauma of war and totalitarian regimes. Thanks to a special printing technique, the portraits gradually faded—just as their image fades in our memory. While working on the “Strength and Beauty” series, Kowalewski engaged in artistic dialogue with renowned Israeli artist Dan Reisinger.

In 2017, Paweł Kowalewski held a solo exhibition at the prestigious Jerke Museum—the first foreign institution in Germany devoted primarily to Polish avant-garde art. The project “Zeitgeist” included sculptures and the artist’s most significant paintings from the 1980s, including “Me Shot by Indians.” During the exhibition, Kowalewski’s large-format works, such as the “Psalms of David,” were also presented at St. Peter’s Church in Recklinghausen. These works still retain a universal character, addressing issues of individual autonomy in the face of higher powers.

Collections and Exhibitions

Paweł Kowalewski’s works are held in the largest Polish museums, as well as at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and numerous private collections in Poland and abroad. His works have been acquired by, among others: the National Museum in Warsaw, the National Museum in Krakow, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Jerke Museum, the Museum of Art in Łódź, the District Museum in Bydgoszcz, the Upper Silesian Museum in Bytom, the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, as well as the ING Polish Art Foundation, the Starak Family Foundation, the Benetton Foundation, and the Egit Foundation. Private collectors include Donald Pirie, Cartier, Isy Brachot, Andrzej Bonarski, and Jan Zylber.

Kowalewski’s works have been shown at the Jerke Museum in Germany, the Artist’s House in Tel Aviv, the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the Isy Brachot Gallery in Brussels, Dorotheum in Vienna, Sotheby’s in London, Zachęta in Warsaw, the Museum of Photography in Krakow, MOCAK, the Propaganda Gallery in Warsaw (formerly Appendix), and at art fairs in Vienna, Brussels, and Stockholm. In 2021, Frieze magazine—one of the most important critical art publications—selected the ten best exhibitions of 2020 in European cultural institutions. Among them was “Tell me about yesterday tomorrow,” organized by NS-Dokumentationszentrum in Munich, where Kowalewski’s acclaimed work “Europeans Only” was presented.

Paweł Kowalewski is the only Polish artist invited by Achille Bonito Oliva—the “pope” of the Italian art scene and an internationally renowned curator—to participate in the group exhibition “A.B.O. THEATRON. L’Arte o la Vita / Art or Life” alongside stars such as Louise Bourgeois, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Marcel Duchamp, Damien Hirst, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin.

He has also participated in important exhibitions summarizing the period of Polish transformation and political relations before and after 1989, such as “Banana Revolution,” “Moscow – Warsaw,” “Irreligion,” and “Homeland in Art.”

Art Market and Professional Life

A painting by Paweł Kowalewski destroyed in a flood, “Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?” (1986), became the first NFT work sold at a live auction of art in Poland. The pioneering auction took place at DESA Unicum on December 2, 2021. The destroyed work thus passes into eternity in digital form.

In 1991, Paweł Kowalewski founded his own advertising agency, Communication Unlimited, which he still runs today. In 2024, his painting “My Friends Against the Background of My Ancestors” (1988) was auctioned at the Polswiss Art Auction House in Warsaw for PLN 240,000, one of the record results for Kowalewski’s paintings in recent years.

Also in 2024, a solo exhibition of the artist was held at the MCSW “Elektrownia” in Radom, presenting works created over the past seven years—including paintings, installations, sculptures, and photographic works (about seventy objects in total). That same year, another solo exhibition took place at the Polish Institute in Berlin, showcasing the series of portraits of Polish women of Jewish origin, “Strength and Beauty” (2015), which disappear when exposed to light.