Sławomir Witkowski
Visual artist working primarily in painting.
Sławomir Witkowski is a Polish painter, graphic artist, and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. His practice is centred on expressive figurative painting, with a particular focus on the human condition as shaped by violence, exclusion, memory, and the moral tensions of contemporary life.
“I paint figures in states of suspension—neither present nor absent”
My work examines how individuals are marked by systems of power, social exclusion, and the violence of being rendered invisible. I paint figures in states of suspension—neither present nor absent, neither subject nor object.
The cycles I develop are not narrative sequences but visual fields where the body becomes evidence of pressure, collapse, and endurance. What matters is the trace—the residue left by experience on flesh, gesture, and face.
Sławomir Witkowski is a Polish painter, graphic artist, and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. His practice is centred on painting, and in particular on expressive figuration as a means of confronting the human condition within contemporary systems of violence, exclusion, memory, and symbolic power.
Working across painting and graphic art, Witkowski has developed a visual language grounded in strong contour, heightened colour, deformation, and psychological charge. His images often move between the individual body and the collective condition, between private tension and public catastrophe. Rather than offering narrative illustration, they construct dense moral and emotional situations that ask to be read slowly and looked at with sustained attention.
A recurring concern in his work is the instability of human identity under pressure: political, social, historical, or existential. His cycles address such subjects as war, surveillance, ecological destruction, social marginalisation, ritualised fear, and the corrosion of community. At the same time, his work remains deeply rooted in the language of painting itself: gesture, matter, rhythm, and the tension between figuration and dissolution.
Alongside his artistic practice, Witkowski has long been associated with the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, where he has played an important role in teaching and institutional life. This dual position—artist and academic—has shaped a practice that is both visually immediate and intellectually self-aware, grounded in the conviction that painting remains a serious instrument of reflection on contemporary experience.
Zeroed Out
Museum of Contemporary Art
National Museum
Warsaw
Witkowski - monograph
2023Of the artist's many mythologies, Sławomir Witkowski seems closest to the Romantic consciousness, a crucial element of which is the "philosophy of illness." Witkowski draws the viewer into the game, presenting reality as pathological.
Patogen
2021The official catalogue of Sławomir Witkowski’s Patogen, capturing the essence of his artistic vision
PANGEA – a confession of imagination
2015This is a story from a very ancient time, when the world was a single entity. Some called it Paradise, others Pangaea. It is not a linear story with a beginning and an end. Rather, it is a record of individual scenes from a fascinating, forgotten legend about the origins of our existence.
Working with my practice?
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