Artist's biograms

Adam Adach (b. 1962, Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki)
Graduated in veterinary studies from Warsaw (1981). Towards the end of the 1980s he emigrated to France, where he studied first at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon (1990) and later as a post-graduate student at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1995). He lives and works in France and Poland.
Adach’s painting has addressed the issue of memory on many occasions. As an artist he draws on both his personal memories and experiences (e.g. the polyptych Last summer, 2002, which employs autobiographical themes), and experiences from the collective memory, tackling issues from more or less recent history, including subjects connected with the experience of the Holocaust and World War II. This is the theme of works including Birke (2005), Untitled (Treblinka, 2003-2004) and his project inspired by private photographs of SS officers (e.g. SS Accordion). Indeed, he often uses photographs as a starting point – whether press cuttings, historical photographs, book illustrations or private snaps. But the “found” material is always processed in some way, taking on an ambiguous character and a new context.

Bogusław Bachorczyk (b. 1969, Sucha Beskidzka)
Studied in the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (diploma, under Prof. Włodzimierz Kunz, 1998). Since 2002 he has been working on a permanent basis for the Krakow Academy as an assistant and educator.
The genres of art in which he works are painting, sculpture, photography and video art. A characteristic aspect of his creative expression is the gender perspective he employs to convey the narrative of his works. His sources of inspiration include history, contemporary literature, and film. His home and studio is a unique example of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a constant work in progress, an installation that occupies the entire space.
In his cyclical, multi-themed works, he returns again and again to the question of memory and its mechanisms. He is particularly interested in the way images and events become distorted, how they are endowed with new meanings, and how the conventions of recall and commemoration are revised.

Mirosław Bałka (b. 1958, Warsaw)
Studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (diploma, under Prof. Jan Kucz, 1985). In the years 2005–2011 he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, and since 2011 he has been head of Spatial Design Projects at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
In the years 1985–1987 he, Mirosław Filonik and Marek Kijewski formed the artistic group Neue Bieriemiennost. Memory, passing and traces are the salient threads in his work. His works such as Die Rampe (1994), Winterreise (2003), Witaj/Wilkommen (2006), and I Knew It Had 4 in It (2008), in which he references memory of the Holocaust, fall into the “post-memory” stream (a description by Marianne Hirsch referring to second-generation, post-eye-witness memory). The artist’s diploma piece, entitled Memento of my first Communion (1985), remains extremely important to him, continuing to provoke auto-reflection and inspire him to the effort of processing. He referenced the work in his 2011 exhibition Arbeitsplatz.
Memory of the body, objects and fragments, and above all absence as memory of presence, are elements of the past, both personal and that not his own, that are of particular importance to him, which he processes and endows with new meanings (e.g. in his exhibition Around 21°15’00’’E 52°06’17’’N + GO-GO, 2001).

Andrzej P. Bator (b. 1954, Wrocław)
Head of the Photomedia Unit at the Department of Media Art, Faculty of Printmaking, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. Editor-in-chief of the academic art journal "Dyskurs" published by the Wrocław Academy. A regular contributor to the art magazine "Format". He is active in photography, and makes photographic and multimedia installations.
Memory is one of the key threads in his photographic work, above all in the series Places of oblivion (1998–2001), Still life of memory (1999–2000), Anamnesis – [re]construction of an image (2001–2004). The multi-layered photographic images in the series Anamnesis, created by making multiple exposures, refer to the way memory works – as the superimposition and intermingling of scraps of memories composed of moments, sections of space, defined and non-defined forms, and faces of loved ones and strangers.

Monika Chlebek (b. 1986, Krakow)
Graduate of the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts (diploma 2011). In addition to painting, she also draws, and makes collages and objects. Her works, which combine real form with a dream-like quality, are almost surreal in their poetic expression. Imagination, the interplay of unexpected associations and juxtapositions, and an air of mystery and unease are the main hallmarks of her artistic style.
Many of Chlebek’s works incorporate references to issues of memory, the past, intimate experiences, and hidden anxiety. Some of these are the series Bad dreams (2010), The aftertaste of childhood (2011), and Let’s sit here for 5 more minutes (2013). Monika Chlebek is one of a number of young artists who have adopted a surrealist convention in their work.

Michał Chudzicki (b. 1983, Kraśnik)
Graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (diploma 2011). He is the co-founder of Kolektyw Roboczogodzina (The Working Hour Collective). His art betrays influences from the surrealist aesthetic, and many of his works process famous motifs and themes from European art (e.g. the works Portrait of Dr George Cayley, 2010; Man in black, 2011). In 2011 he created the persona of Bruno Lark (1901–1936), a Polish painter, draughtsman and poet who died tragically in a fire. He created not only a fictional biography for this artist, but also the works he supposedly made – Dadaesque collages and objects. The presentation of Lark’s “rediscovered” oeuvre took place in 2012 in the Polish Institute in Düsseldorf, and the demystification of the project a year later in Warsaw (at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle).

Piotr Czerwiński (b. 1969, Krakow)
Graduated in architecture from Krakow Polytechnic (1995). In the years 1997–2007 he worked at the DDJM architecture studio under Marek Dunikowski. He was a co-author of the design for the museum building at the Site of Memory in Bełżec (1997–2004), which was awarded a special prize in the SARP competition for “Design of the Year” (2005). At present he designs with the studio UCEES, where his partners are Piotr Uherek and Marek Szpinda.

Marek Dunikowski (b. 1950)
Graduated in 1974 from the Faculty of Architecture at the Krakow Polytechnic, where he subsequently lectured until 1986. He also lectured at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, USA. Since 1991 he has had an architecture office in Krakow, DDJM, which can take credit for major projects such as Centrum Biurowe Lubicz and Centrum Handlowe Krakchemia in Krakow, and the European Krzysztof Penderecki Center for Music building in Lusławice. With Piotr Czerwiński and Piotr Uherek he is a co-author of the museum building in the Site of Memory in Bełżec (1997–2004).

Franciszek Duszeńko (b. 1925,  Gródek Jagielloński nr Lwów; d. 2008, Gdańsk)
Sculptor, soldier in the Home Army (AK), internee of concentration camps. Studied at the Lwów State Institute of the Visual Arts and the State Institute of the Visual Arts (now the State School of Fine Arts) in Sopot (diploma 1952). He combined his artistic work with teaching: he was a professor, and in the years 1981–1987 the rector of the State School of the Visual Arts (now the Academy of Fine Arts) in Gdańsk. He was involved in reconstruction work on works of sculpture in Gdańsk destroyed during the war. He is the author of the memorial to the Defenders of the Coast in Gdańsk (with Adam Haupt and Henryk Kitowski) and the memorial to the Memory of the Victims of the Death Camp in Treblinka (with Adam Haupt and Franciszek Strynkiewicz). He also designed plans for the revitalisation of Westerplatte.

Darek Foks (b. 1966, Skierniewice)
Poet and prose writer. A graduate of the State School of Film, Television and Theatre in Łódź (scriptwriting), he also studied in the Theatre Studies Faculty of the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw. One of the leading proponents of the “bruLion generation” and editor of the prose section in the monthly Twórczość. A key differentiator of his style is irony, and he makes frequent use of elements of popular culture, including borrowings from films. He is the co-author of the book What the courier girl does (2005), which juxtaposes his texts with photomontages by Zbigniew Libera featuring actresses from films by Federico Fellini set against backdrops of ruins. This project incorporated content related to how representations of the past function within culture, and examined the role and working of vehicles of memory (mediatisation).

Karolina Freino (b. 1978, Poznań)
Studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław (1998–2003), the School of Sculpture, Edinburgh College of Art, and the Bauhaus University in Weimar (MFA “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies”). Since 2006 she and the artists Dušica Dražić, Sam Hopkins and Teresa Luzio have formed the artistic group usually4.
She makes site-specific installations, and performs happenings and interventions in the public space and the public sphere (media). Her project Walls and sandpits (Szczecin, 2007), which bears all the hallmarks of artistic projects in the post-memory (memory of the Holocaust in later generations) vein, addresses the issue of use of German and Jewish headstones as building material for walls, sandpits, rubbish tips and paths. In “un-forgetting” these fragments, by creating a body of photographic documentation and publishing the inscriptions visible on the stones in the form of death announcements in the local press, she restores a dignified place in the social consciousness to those once forgotten.

Nicolas Grospierre (b. 1975,  Geneva)
Photographer. Educated as a sociologist at the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris and the London School of Economics. Since the end of the 1990s he has lived in Warsaw. Grospierre began with a series of portraits documenting societal data (e.g. Portrait of a community: Kamionka, 2001). In time, his trademark became architectural photography, in particular images of late modernist buildings (e.g. Colourblocks, 2005–2006). He is counted among the group known as “new documentalists”. He has devised an idiosyncratic formal language composed of objective typological shots of objects that intimate the influence of the Bechers’ aesthetics. Reflection on the recent past, memory, and traces of presence are constantly recurring threads in his work. He has tackled other issues, such as the subject of archives, in projects exploiting the context of place: Library (2006) and A photograph that grows (2011). The latter was a kind of intervention in the studio of the photographer Tadeusz Sumiński, and provoked questions not only on the nature of the archive, but also on the medium of photography itself.

Oskar Hansen (b. 1922, Helsinki; d. 2005, Warsaw)
Studied at the Technical Institute in Vilnius and in the Faculty of Architecture at Warsaw Polytechnic (diploma, under Romuald Gutt, 1951). While a student he won a study grant to Paris, where he gained practical experience in the studio of Pierre Jeanneret and studied under Fernand Léger, 1948–1950). From 1950 he was employed on a permanent basis at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts as a lecturer and educator. In 1959 he first published his concept of Open Form, which was to be the foundation of all his innovative architectural and urban planning projects (the Continuous Linear System). This formed the basis for his never realised design Memorial-Road (jointly with a team also comprising Zofia Hansen, Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, Edmund Kupiecki, Julian Pałka and Lechosław Rosiński). The design was awarded first prize in the International Competition for a Memorial to the Victims of Fascism in Auschwitz-Birkenau (1958). The revolutionary concept of Memorial-Road was based on the rejection of the traditional memorial formula and treatment of the whole site of the camp as a commemorative zone, to be left in its untouched state and allowed to succumb gradually to a natural process of entropy. The only artistic input would be a black asphalt road running diagonally through the site, symbolically striking through the place.

Zofia Hansen née Garlińska (b. 1924, Kałuszyn nr Mińsk Mazowiecki; d. 2013, Warsaw)
Graduated in architecture from Warsaw Polytechnic in 1952 (diploma under Romuald Gutt). With her husband, Oskar Hansen, she co-authored not only the visionary Continuous Linear System concept but also the theory of Open Form that underpinned it. According to this theory, an artwork is not an enclosed whole, but is subject to change dependent on its changing context, circumstances and individual reception. The Hansens’ house in Szumin was the forge where this theory was hammered out. The Open Form idea was the basis for the Memorial-Road design, created in cooperation with a team comprising Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, Edmund Kupiecki, Julian Pałka and Lechosław Rosiński. Though the design won first prize in the International Competition for a Memorial to the Victims of Fascism in Auschwitz-Birkenau (1958), it was never made. Nevertheless, it transformed approaches to designing memorials, and, like the design by Reg Butler for the memorial to the Unknown Political Prisoner (1953), is considered to have played a revolutionary role in the art of the second half of the twentieth century.

Władysław Hasior (b. 1928, Nowy Sącz; d. 1999, Krakow)
Studied at the State High School for Visual Arts in Zakopane under Prof. Antoni Kenar (1947–1952), and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw under Prof. Marian Wnuk (1952–1958). He also received a study grant from the French minister of culture that enabled him to study in the atelier of Ossip Zadkine in Paris (1959). He made provocative, unconventional memorials and plein-air sculptures in which he tried to harness the natural elements, as in Solar chariot (Södertälje, Sweden, 1972), Firebirds (Szczecin, 1975), and Flamebirds (Koszalin, 1977). His most controversial work, especially in political terms, was the memorial Iron Organ, made in 1966 and standing at the Snozka pass near Kluszkowce. Erected to commemorate “those who fell in the cause of reinforcing the people’s power in the Podhale region”, after the collapse of the People’s Republic of Poland, in the fervour to destroy unwanted monuments, it ignited a conflict. The right-wing authorities called for it to be dismantled, but artistic circles and the local community defended it, stressing its outstanding artistic qualities. Ultimately it was saved, and renovated on the initiative of the Foundation for the Development of the Czorsztyn Lake Region.

Adam Haupt (b. 1920, Krakow; d. 2006, Sopot)
Architect. Studied architecture at the Lwów Polytechnic (now Lviv Polytechnic National University) and subsequently at the Krakow Polytechnic (now the Cracow University of Technology), where he was awarded his diploma in 1946. He also learned painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. He had links with the academic community in Gdańsk, where he was a professor at the State School of the Visual Arts (PWSSP), head of its Basic Industrial Design Studio and Ship and Industrial Form Design Studio, and for many years dean of the Faculty of Architecture and prorector of the institute. Author of the memorial to the Defenders of the Coast in Gdańsk (with Franciszek Duszeńko and Henryk Kitowski), the memorial to the Memory of the Victims of the Death Camp in Treblinka (with Franciszek Duszeńko and Franciszek Strynkiewicz), and the French Military Cemetery in Gdańsk.

Rafał Jakubowicz (1974, Poznań)
Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań in the Faculty of Artistic Education (1999) and the Faculty of Painting, Printmaking and Sculpture (2002). He is the co-founder of the artistic group Wunderteam, and also an art critic.
Although his oeuvre includes no lack of works looking at issues including the role and place of art and the artist, the dominant threads in his creative agenda are defined by the questions of memory /non-memory, and the related tensions and  areas of silence. One of Jakubowicz’s best known works is that referencing the discreditable past of Volkswagen, and above all laying bare the mechanisms of power – Arbeitsdisziplin (2002). His project entitled Swimming pool (2003) is an exemplification of his strategy of using apparently neutral objects which by means of his intervention reveal layers of forgotten/displaced meanings and content. Here, he projected onto the façade of a former synagogue building in Poznań the Hebrew inscription “swimming pool”; during the German occupation, the building was converted into a swimming pool and it continues to function as one to this day. He used a similar idea in his project Es beginnt in Breslau (2008), which addresses above all the issue of German heritage in the “reclaimed territories” in the west of Poland.

Elżbieta Janicka, Dr. (b. 1970, Warsaw)
Literary scholar and photographer. Graduated from the Université Paris VII Denis Diderot (1989–1994) and studied photography at the State School of Film, Television and Theatre (PWSFTViT) in Łódź (1995–1998). Her published books include a monograph on the wartime writer Andrzej Trzebiński (Sztuka czy Naród? Monografia pisarska Andrzeja Trzebińskiego, Universitas, Kraków 2006) and Festung Warschau (Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, Warszawa 2011), which focuses on plurality and conflicts of memory.
In Janicka’s cycle Odd places (2003–2004) a profound reflection on the Shoah is combined with a minimalist language of expression. The work comprises six large-scale black-and-white photographs of the air above Auschwitz II Birkenau, Kulmhof am Ner, Majdanek, Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, and corresponding audio material. Echoes of the Jewish theme are also present in the cycle Another city (since 2011) made jointly with Wojciech Wilczyk, which is composed of contemporary images of Warsaw corresponding to the territory of the former ghetto.

Zuzanna Janin (b. 1964, Warsaw)
Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1980–1987). The co-founder of the gallery lokal_30, and the author of installations, sculptures, video pieces, objects, photographs and artistic happenings. Janin’s creative strategy is based on seeking inspiration from her own biography, experiences and emotions, which are transposed into the language of art. She is interested in issues of place, identity, memory and passing. In her series from the 1990s entitled Covers she used material to make three-dimensional installations that replicated the shapes of places and objects familiar to her. In the photographic installation Follow me, replace me, it is time, she used photographs of parts of her own body and those of people close to her. The theme of death and passing was strongly accented in the project I have seen my own death (2003). Her work Art-memory game, an internet version of her installation Pamięć/Memory (since 1993) is a unique kind of archive of memory. She returned to the subject of the archive in her video piece Uwolnić. Cвободa. Free (2013), which involved restoration of the memory of Teofila Blendkowska, a female insurgent who saw action in the failed 1831 January Uprising in the Polish independence cause.

Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz (b. 1919, Kalisz; d. 2005, Warsaw)
Studied at the Institute of Visual Arts in Krakow in the years 1936–1938, and obtained his diploma from the Municipal School of Decorative Arts in Warsaw (1939). After the war he studied in the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1947–1950), where he remained permanently, as head of the sculpture studio for 35 years.
In addition to realistic sculpture, he also created abstract spatial compositions – Sails, Windows, Rhythms. He was the co-author (with Oskar Hansen, Zofia Hansen, Edmund Kupiecki, Julian Pałka and Lechosław Rosiński) of the unrealised design Memorial-Road, the winning entry in the International Competition for a Memorial to the Victims of Fascism in Auschwitz-Birkenau (1958). When pressure from representatives of former prisoners’ associations forced requests for revision of what was evidently too innovative a design, Oskar Hansen withdrew it altogether, and Jarnuszkiewicz entered into cooperation with a team of Italian sculptors, becoming co-author of a new memorial, a compromise, which was unveiled in 1967.

Tadeusz Kantor (b. 1915, Wielopole Skrzyńskie; d. 1990, Krakow)
Studied painting and set design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (1934–1939). He was a lecturer at his alma mater and one of the most outstanding personalities on the Polish art scene. Director, set designer, painter, author of happenings, and art theoretician. Co-founder of the Grupa Młodych Plastyków (Group of Young Visual Artists), also known as II Grupa Krakowska (Krakow Group II). He was the initiator of the Krzysztofory Gallery and the founder of an underground experimental theatre (1942–1944) which was later pursued as the Cricot 2 theatre. It was his theatre productions that brought him greatest recognition. Kantor’s plays were inspired by the work of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz. A significant component of his artistic output was contributed by material from his own biography, which transforms his plays into unique archives of memory. Personal elements form a particularly strong presence in productions such as The dead class (1975), Where are last year’s snows? (1979), Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), Today is my birthday (1991). As a visual artist he made works in the Tachisme style, as well as emballages and assemblages. He was also the author of some of the first happenings, including The dividing-line (1966) and Panoramic sea-happening (1967).

Marcin Kędzierski (b. 1969, Radom)
Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw: drawing (under Prof. Julian Raczko) and painting (with Prof. Grzegorz Pablo) in the Faculty of Printmaking, and in the Faculty of Painting under Leon Tarasewicz. He obtained his diploma in poster design from the studio of Prof. Mieczysław Wasilewski.
His inspiration in his painting is the monotony of the urban everyday reality – high-rise estates, packed buses, bus stops, underpasses, etc. He paints in tempera on the basis of his own photographs, which he uses like notes from which he draws the most important elements remembered from the images in the frame. His works offer a highly synthetic, though ambiguous image of the postcommunist city, which seems to oscillate between nostalgia and disapproval.

Jerzy Kosałka (b. 1955, Będzin)
Studied painting at the Institute of Visual Arts in Wrocław, graduating in 1981. In the 1980s and 1990s he was active in the artistic group LUXUS, founded in 1983 as a contestative response to the greyness of reality under martial law.
He employs a wide variety of technologies and media in his work, making installations, models and objects. He works in the public space and does performance art.
In his works in the series The Germans have come (2011) he addresses the issues of Poland’s “reclaimed territories”, forgetting of the German past, and the obliteration of inconvenient history from these regions. Through the motif of “toppling monuments” and profaning them, he draws attention to conflict in memory. He lays bare the mechanisms by which official memory is manipulated, whereby those wielding it pass over historical facts in silence, remove unwanted symbols, and create new ones.

Robert Kuśmirowski (b. 1973, Łódź)
Studied in the Faculty of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin (1998–2003). He creates installations and objects, and practises photography and performance art. While still a student, in 2002, he recreated an old railway station in Galeria Biała in Lublin. This debut set the scene for the mode of activity that he was to develop in subsequent years. With his trademark diligence, Kuśmirowski frequently makes reconstructions of objects from the past, which often attain imposing dimensions and combine his characteristic forms of expression with reflection on memory, history and the ephemerality of material culture. His performances evince a similar style of suspension between the past and the present.

Leszek Lewandowski (b. 1960, Świerklaniec)
In the years 1983–1988 he studied in the Katowice Faculty of Graphic Design of the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts. His works combine the traditions of kinetic art, op-art and geometric abstraction. He is interested in issues from the field of optics, and analysis of our vision and perception. Before he began to create his objects, which are inspired by optical instruments, he spent many years as a painter. The instruments he makes include “imaginoscopes”, which are designed to take the viewer into a kind of trance. He employs certain methods to achieve an effect of blurred shapes, movement, and new colours. His work also provokes reflection on painting.

Zbigniew Libera (b. 1959, Pabianice)
Studied in the Faculty of Pedagogy at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (1979). The author of photographs, films, installations, drawings and objects, he is considered the precursor of Polish critical art. In his works he analyses cultural stereotypes and codes, and explores the mechanisms of mass culture and the functioning of image in the media. In the 1980s he created the moving material entitled Intimate rites, documenting care of his sick grandmother. Also from this period is the painting How to train little girls (1987). The next decade brought development of the same themes. Behavioural models, gender stereotyping and the cult of the body are among those explored in his works Ken’s Aunt (1994), You can shave the baby (1996), and the series Corrective devices. In 1996 he made one of his most iconic pieces: Lego. Concentration camp. Another major theme in his work is focused on shaping visual memory. He develops this issue in works including the cycle Positives (2002–2003) and the book What the courier girl does, 2005, written with Dariusz Foks and referencing the history of the Warsaw Uprising.

Robert Maciejuk (b. 1965, Biała Podlaska)
Studied painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1985–1990). In the years 1991–1995 he was an assistant at his alma mater. In the 1990s his work was inspired by Renaissance architecture; over time, the architectural motifs he employed were reduced to simple geometric forms (circles, triangles and the rectangle). Around the mid-1990s logos and symbols sourced from the contemporary iconosphere appear in his repertoire – he makes works including creatively processed logos of famous corporations and organisations, road signs, etc. A major episode in his artistic development is that designated by works inspired by characters from children’s stories. He filled canvases with representations of various teddy bear characters such as Winnie the Pooh. These are not works of naïve nostalgia for childhood, however. The tangible rift in these images, a type of crack or fissure, incorporates a reflection on passing and introduces a vanitative element. In time, the artist moved away from reproductions of children’s characters in favour of depictions of fairytale landscapes devoid of all staffage.

Marzanna Morozewicz (b. 1965, Białystok)
Studied at the Institute of Artistic Education at the Marie Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin (1984–1989). In 1998 she defended her doctorate, and in 2007 her post-doctoral thesis, in the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2000 she studied art therapy at the Polish Erickson Institute in Łódź. Since 2012 she has been the head of the Visual Education Unit in the Faculty of Pedagogy and Psychology at the University of Białystok.
The dominant motif in her artistic work is references to female corporeality. She uses imprints of her own body, which she calls “flakes”, as painting supports. In applying paint to them, she is at once registering her emotions and recording the stimuli her senses receive. These “flakes” are a memory record of her sensuality and mental sensitivity.

Anna Niesterowicz (b. 1974, Warsaw)
In the years 1995–2000 she was a student of the Faculty of Sculpture at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (in the studio of Prof. Grzegorz Kowalski). She makes video works, installations, objects and press illustrations. Identity, memory, private mythologies and issues of language are constantly recurring themes in her art. Her film Gierek (2000), which used archival film footage of a visit by the First Secretary of the Communist Party to the preschool she attended, was a personal piece referencing her childhood. The installation Darkness and mould (diploma, 2000) addressed the theme of family taboos. The issues of identity, conflict of memory and nationalism are tackled in her later works, among them The Polish part of Silesia (2005) and the film and installation Shame (2006).

Mirosław Nizio (b. 1964, Biłgoraj)
Studied in the Faculty of Interior Design and the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and on an interior design course at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. He has his own design studio, Nizio Design International, which can take credit for major projects including the main exhibition at the Warsaw Uprising Museum, the Museum of the Factory in Łódź, and the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews in Warsaw, as well as the architectural designs for the building of Wrocław Contemporary Museum, the Mausoleum of the Martyrdom of Poland’s Villages in Michniów, and the museum commemorating the Miracle at the Vistula, Gateway to the Battle of Warsaw. Her design Stone Hell KL Gross-Rosen II (2007) was created to commemorate the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Nazi forced labour camp in the quarries near Rogoźnica. The central idea behind the concept for this monument is the incorporation of the whole historical site of the quarry by incorporating into the space sculptural and architectural elements that make symbolic reference to the daily path trodden by the prisoners.

Ryszard Otręba (b. 1932, Suszec nr Pszczyna)
Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (1953–1959), where he subsequently remained for many years as a lecturer and pedagogue: head of the Department of Visual Communication in the Faculty of Industrial Design (until 1998).
In addition to his artistic activity in the field of industrial design and graphic design, he also makes artistic prints, chiefly plaster prints. An important theme in his works in this field is his traumatic childhood wartime experience. He himself survived a real threat of execution by firing squad, while his father, Paweł Otręba, and his brother Józef were taken to Auschwitz concentration camp, and perished. His two sisters, Łucja and Waleria, were imprisoned first in Auschwitz, then in Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Eberswald, but survived, as did his mother, a prisoner in the camps in Gliwice and Opole. His other brother Franciszek and his brother-in-law were executed in public by firing squad. Otręba’s prints are extremely moving examples of the memory of a direct witness of the Holocaust.

Julian Pałka (b. 1923, Poznań; d. 2002, Warsaw)
Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1945–1951) in the Faculty of Printmaking (under Józef Mroszczak) and the Faculty of Painting (under Jan Cybis). In 1953 he returned to his alma mater to work: first as a lecturer in the Typography Studio, later as a professor and head of the Faculty of Typographic Design, and also, in the period 1972–1980, as rector. Between 1993 and 2002 he headed the Graphic Design Faculty at the European Academy of Art in Warsaw.
His main areas of activity were poster design, museum exhibitions, and displays in the Polish pavilions at international expo fairs. He was also active in book design.
One salient work in his oeuvre is the design for the Memorial-Road created by a team also comprising Oskar Hansen, Zofia Hansen, Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, Lechosław Rosiński and Edmund Kupiecki. Although it won first prize in the International Competition for a Memorial to the Victims of Fascism in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1958, it was never realised. Nevertheless, its avant-garde conception played a transformative role in the formulation and shaping of contemporary memorials.

Zdzisław Pidek (b. 1954, Bychawa; d. 2006, Gdańsk)
Studied in the Faculty of Sculpture at the State Institute of the Visual Arts in Gdańsk (diploma under Prof. Franciszek Duszeńko). From 1980 he was employed on a permanent basis by the Institute as a pedagogue and lecturer.
In addition to small-scale sculpture and installations he also made monumental memorial projects. With Andrzej Sołyga he was the author of the designs for the Cemetery for the Victims of Totalitarianism in Kharkiv-Pyatichatki, Ukraine, and the Polish Military Cemetery in Mednoye, Russia (1995, built 1999–2000).
Also in a team under Andrzej Sołyga he co-authored the concept for a memorial on the site of the former Nazi extermination camp in Bełżec (with Marcin Roszczyk; architecture: DDJM Biuro Architektoniczne, Marek Dunikowski, Piotr Uherek, Piotr Czerwiński; design 1997, built 2003–2004). This design was awarded the Special Prize in the SARP Prize of the Year 2004.

Wojciech Prażmowski (b. 1949, Częstochowa)
Studied at the Škole Vytvarnej Fotografii in Brno, Czechosovakia (diploma 1974). Teaches at the State School of Film, Television and Theatre (PWSFTViT) in Łódź; previously connected with the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. A proponent of the staged photography current. His initial area of artistic work was metaphoric photography, but a watershed came with his First world exhibition of ruined photographs (1989), where he presented works that set the course for his subsequent artistic quest. In the second half of the 1990s he began to create photographic objects (e.g. Forgetting, 1996). In these works he uses old photographs, which he processes, juxtaposes, and uses as the basis for new stories. He is a keen user of photomontage, and applies his interventions to the positive image. His series Hommage à... (od 1995) is devoted to famous personalities of the twentieth century. In addition to staged photography, he also makes documentary works, such as the series White-red-black (1999), a photographic portrait of 1990s Poland.

Marcin Roszczyk,  (b. 1954, Warsaw)
Studied in the Faculty of Sculpture at the State School for the Visual Arts in Gdańsk (in the  studio of Prof. Adam Smolany) and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the studios of Prof. Bohdan Chmielewski and Prof. Gustaw Zemła. 
Co-author of the memorial complex on the site of the former Nazi concentration camp in Bełżec (with Andrzej Sołyga and Zdzisław Pidek; architecture – Biuro DDJM, Marek Dunikowski, Piotr Uherek, Piotr Czerwiński; design 1997, realisation 2003–2004). The design was awarded the Special Prize in the competition for the SARP  Prize of the Year 2004, and was nominated for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture. Mies van der Rohe Award. Together with Andrzej Sołyga, Dariusz Śmiechowski and Reinhard Coppenrath he designed the Memorial to the Victims of Forced Labour Camps in Braunschweig, Germany.

Leszek Sobocki (b. 1934, Częstochowa)
Studied in the Faculty of Propaganda Printmaking in Katowice (1953–1956) and in the Department of Painting at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts (1956–1959). He continued his studies in the Faculty of Directing at the State Theatre and Film School in Łódź (1959–1960). A founder member of the WPROST group (from 1965). Following his best-known series of paintings: Coffin portraits from the 1970s and Self-portraits from the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, religious and national elements began to appear in his work. In his pieces from the 1990s he started to employ memories from his childhood during the occupation. He used old photographs, enlarging them, touching them up with paint, and juxtaposing them with paintings he created in parallel. These diptychs referenced the Holocaust seen from a very personal perspective, in splintered moments remembered through the eyes of a child.

Andrzej Sołyga (b. 1955, Zagrody)
Studied in the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (diploma 1981), and remained there as an educator until 2003.
Author (with Zdzisław Pidek) of the design for the Cemetery of the Victims of Totalitarianism in Kharkiv-Pyatichatki, Ukraine, and the Polish Military Cemetery in Mednoye, Russia (1995, built 1999–2000). In 2012, with a team also comprising Dariusz Śmiechowski and Dariusz Komorek, he won first prize in a competition for a memorial commemorating the Smolensk air crash.
One major work in his oeuvre is the memorial on the site of the former Nazi extermination camp in Bełżec (with Zdzisław Pidek and Marcin Roszczyk; architecture: Biuro DDJM, Marek Dunikowski, Piotr Uherek, Piotr Czerwiński; design 1997, built 2003–2004). The uniqueness of the artistic conception of this memorial lies in the rejection of the traditional form of the memorial in favour of exposure of the expression of the entire site as the graveyard of six hundred thousand people, transformed into a barren, cinder-covered land. The axis of the site plan is a fissure-like path driving forcibly deeper into the site, forcing movement: entry and progress through the moving emptiness.

Franciszek Strynkiewicz (b. 1893, Mogielnica; d. 1996, Warsaw)
Sculptor, decorated with the Cross of Independence and the Gold Cross of Merit. He studied at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts (now the Academy of Fine Arts) under Tadeusz Breyer. On obtaining his diploma in 1927 he was employed at his alma mater, and for many years was its rector. He has made many sepulchral sculptures and memorial, including that of the pioneering Polish airmen Franciszek Żwirko and Stanisław Wigura in Warsaw’s Powązki Cemetery (1934) and the Adam Mickiewicz memorial in Gliwice (1957). One important piece in his oeuvre is the memorial to the Memory of the Victims of the Death Camp in Treblinka, which he made with Franciszek Duszeńko and Adam Haupt.

Władysław Strzemiński (b. 1893, Minsk; d. 1952, Łódź)
Until the outbreak of World War I he studied at the Military School of Engineering in Petersburg. From 1918 he began to take an intense interest in art, and forged contacts with Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. He attended the First Free State Art Studios (SVOMAS) in Moscow. In 1922 he and his wife Katarzyna Kobro emigrated to Poland. He was one of the most active members of the groups Blok and Praesens. After moving to Łódź in 1929 he founded the group “a.r.” (“artyści rewolucyjni”, revolutionary artists). In 1927, inspired by suprematism and neoplasticism, he formulated the theory of Unism.
In 1945 he made a series of ten collages, To my Jewish friends, which combine pen-and-ink drawings with cuttings of documentary photographs from the ghettos, transports, and concentration camps. Each one is furnished with a title strangely poetic in its disjointed syntax. The whole series is an important work, one of the first to address the Holocaust from the perspective of a powerless eye-witness attempting to keep the memory and give testimony.

Alina Szapocznikow (b. 1926, Kalisz; d. 1973, Praz-Coutant, Francja)
She began her sculptural education with an internship in the Prague studio of Otokar Velimski (1945–1946), and continued it at the Institute of Industrial Art also in Prague (under Josef Wagner) and subsequently at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (under Paul Niclausse). In 1951 she returned for a few years to Poland, but eventually, in 1963, she emigrated to France, where she settled for good. Her traumatic wartime experiences (her time in the ghetto and in concentration camps) made their impression on her artistic work, in which a major thread became remembering the body. She included fragments of her own body, its perishable biological matter captured and recorded in casts, in autobiographic works such as Bellies, Tumours (1968), and Fetishes (1970). Of particular importance is Herbarium (1972), her son’s body captured in polyester – “like herbs dried for eternity, like wounds at long last scarred over”, writes Krystyna Czerni in Rezerwat sztuki (Kraków, 2000).

Piotr Uherek (b. 1962, Krakow)
He graduated in architecture from Krakow Polytechnic (diploma, under Prof. Witold Cęckiewicz ,1987). Until 2007 connected with the architecture studio DDJM directed by Marek Dunikowski, where he was one of the authors of the design for the museum building at the Site of Memory in Bełżec (1997–2004). At present he designs with the studio UCEES, where his partners are Piotr Czerwiński and Marek Szpinda.

Artur Żmijewski (b. 1966, Warsaw)
Studied in the Faculty of Sculpture at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of Grzegorz Kowalski (1990–1995). A multimedia artist with links to the Political Criticism movement, he is the author of a manifesto entitled The applied social arts (2007). He is a leading figure on the Polish critical art scene. His works address taboos, body issues, physical frailty and the Other. These are issues present in films including An eye for an eye (1998), KRWP (2000) and Singing lesson (2001). A major area of his work is composed of pieces tackling the trauma of the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations. Among these are the films Tag (1999), 80064 (2004) and Our songbook (2003). In later years he begins to base his projects on a principle close to the group experiment – he arranges situations and then observes how they develop. This current includes pieces such as Repeat (2005) and Them (2007). He organised a plein-air workshop in Świeć (2009) referencing the idea of artistic symposia in large companies. He is also the author of a documentary film Catastrophe (2010), about the Smoleńsk air crash.