Mariusz Zdybał

Mariusz Zdybał was born in 1955 in Warsaw. In the capital he completed his education — not artistic in the least — and took his first job. Satori came relatively late, in 1981. Personal, existential perturbations led the then-26-year-old Zdybał to a complete reappraisal of his life and a move to provincial — in the good sense of the word — Jelenia Góra. Once there, he decided that he would make his living from painting.

Filled with the zest of a neophyte, he began by studying and copying well-known canvases. His teachers became the «best of the best»: Sandro Botticelli, Titian, the masters of the seventeenth-century Dutch school and, finally, Salvador Dalí — with his unrestrained imagination. After years of study and imitation he formed his own, easily recognisable artistic convention.

In 1988 his first solo exhibition was held at gallery «A» in Kraków. In 1995 he was admitted into the ranks of the Association of Polish Artists and Designers. In 1999 he received the gold medal at the MCA international painting competition in Marseille, and a year later the Grand Prix in Cannes. He has been shown in Warsaw, Gdańsk, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Doesburg and Marseille.

Statement

«From the beginning, from the first painted canvas to this day, I am a hostage of a world of women.» The nineties were, in my painting, the Berlin period — women melancholic, sometimes lost. The twenty-first century is a turn toward serenity and the intensity of colour — a journey toward the joy of life poured onto canvas.

On the painting

Krzysztof Sztuciński, art historian

Viewing Mariusz Zdybał's paintings is usually accompanied by a subtle, hard-to-define tension. It is evoked by configurations — characteristic of his work, not present in the real world — of naturalistically rendered persons, objects and places. This conscious, painterly fusion of real and fantastic elements affects the senses and imagination of the viewer more intensely than it does the intellect.

Zdybał does not tell us beautiful stories, does not comment on reality, does not involve himself in socially important issues. He simply paints — smoothly and pedantically — using his own imagination as spiritus movens. The most rewarding subject for him is the female figure: dressed or naked, standing or walking, lying or sitting, usually alone, suspended in unreal space.

To achieve his intended effects Zdybał composes his canvases vertically. He does not shy from symmetry. This predilection can be explained by his deep studies of past art. In times when it is more frequent to name than to create, his refined work — far from any avant-garde — appears as a noble oasis of calm.