Ryszard Waśko

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."

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."

Łódź (1993–2008)

Curator, director, teacher

Between 1990 and 1992 Wasko became Program Director at the P.S.1 Museum and Institute of Contemporary Art (today called P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center) in New York City and in 1997 he was chosen President of the International Artists Forum (IKG). At the same time he still handled the International Artist's Museum in Lodz. That town became Wasko's new home for over 15 years. The Valand School of Fine Arts in Gothenburg invited him to give lectures as a Professor for two semesters (2004–2005). His artwork has been shown mostly in Europe (e.g. Tate Modern Gallery) and the United States (e.g. The Museum of Modern Art in New York).

Lodz Biennale

In 2004 Wasko amplified a new idea: the Łódź Biennale, to be the first international Biennale in Eastern Europe.

Exploring new territories

Being successful as a director and curator he managed also to work creatively as an artist. In the 90s he worked mostly with primary painting materials like soot. He explored also the field of performance (Meal for the Rich & Poor, 1993) and installation (Child Territories, 1996). Around 2000 Wasko made his turn back to film and photography, but one should not think, he is an artist, who jumps from media to media, from material to material. His is an intermedial artist: "Wasko's works are not limited to any of the artistic genres he uses because they easily cross the borders between them: And his individual realizations, even if they remain - due to the materials used and some general genre manifestations - within a certain kind of art, they still cannot be explained by referring to the characteristics of that branch of art which is realized in them. On the contrary, quite often the fundamental principles which make up the structure of the artefacts come from a different branch of art than the one in which the works were actually created and where we would be inclined to place them."

"The entire trajectory of Ryszard Wasko's career has comprised a substantial, in many ways risk-taking and innovative, extension and enlargement of the role of the artist. (...) He is, in fact, one of those figures who consistently shakes things up and pushes the borders of the possible, certainly with a sense of mission, but also with humor and verve."

Gallery