Ryszard Wasko (Waśko) (born February 21, 1947, in Nysa) is a Polish artist, who has worked in multimedia, including photography, film, video, installation, painting, and drawing. He is also known as a curator and organizer of art events. He lives and works in Berlin.
Early life
Workshop of the Film Form (1970-1977)
He was born in Nysa. As a child he took painting-classes planning to become a painter and wanting to study at the Art Academy in Kraków. But instead of making his childhood dream come true, he made up his mind and went to Łódź, where he studied cinematography at the Film School between 1970 and 1975. During that time he became a member of Workshop of the Film Form, one of the most important artistic groups in Poland in the 70s. Workshop was an avant-garde collective of painters, filmmakers, critics, poets, philosophers and scientists, working with experimental film and multimedia. Later on Ryszard Wasko became a lecturer in the departments of experimental media and photography at the Film School in Lodz.
First accomplishments
In the 70s he took part in the XII São Paulo Art Biennial, documenta 6, the Third International Festival of Independent Avant-garde Film in London, the Sydney Biennale, the XI Biennale de Paris, the V Biennale of Spatial Forms among others. He also created the Archives of Contemporary Thought (1979), a forum for symposia and art events.
Early works
After dealing with experimental film and photography, Wasko started to develop his painting skills again. "Wasko discovered himself as an artist and learned how to cope with everyday life with a greater vision of the world than simply the provincial circumstances of life. " He left the Workshop of the Film Form and came to prominence as a conceptual artist. "After studying film-making at the Academy in Lodz in the late sixties, Wasko went on to become one of Poland's leading conceptualists, working as a pioneer in the media of video and photography. Much of this work focused on dense mathematical structures involving sequences of time and reality." His artistic output should be actually seen as a connection of two main fields: photography&film and painting. "(...) the character of Ryszard Wasko's work in general, as well as the character of his individual works, is often defined by inter-generic, inter-media relations. Those works set in motion a whole net of intertextual relations on the level of general structural and ontological determinants, and on the level of different types of perception and rules of interpretation. In other words, in order to grasp a work which belongs to a certain artistic genre in its specificity, one should refer to its non-specific features which are characteristic for another kind of art."
Construction in Process (1981)
"It is impossible (...) to separate his activities as an artist (as a maker of installations, as a creator of paintings and works on paper) from his other endeavors as a curator, organizer, teacher, writer, agitator (...)." In 1981 in Lodz, Wasko initiated and organized Construction in Process, a series of exhibitions featuring works of art created on site. "(...) it was an important, and in fact crucial, event in the Polish arts scene of that era." Artists who were invited to participate in Construction in Process invite in turn, another group of participants, giving the project a dynamic, open character. " The event became a symbolic alternative to larger institutional art events, including high-powered state and corporate-sponsored biennials and market-driven art fairs." The participating artists were Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, Brian O'Doherty, Dennis Oppenheim, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Nonas and others. After the first event in 1981 The Solidarity Collection (which includes works by the artists created for that event) came into existence. "Wasko continued to produce international events into the nineties, including two additional projects in Lodz (1990 and 1993), one in Israel (1995), one in Australia (1997), and another,(...) in the small town of Bydgogosz in north central Poland (2000)." 2006, 25 years after the opening of the first exhibition, Wasko established the Construction in Process-Museum (also in Lodz). Unfortunately, a waterdamage forced him to close it down (2008) and to devolve the collection to the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz.
Exile (1983-1993)