Ryszard Winiarski

Ryszard Winiarski (March 2, 1936 – December 4, 2006) was a Polish painter and set designer best known for his monochromatic abstract geometric compositions and spatial forms. He has been associated with Conceptualist tendencies in Poland during 1960s and 1970s and is considered one of the key representatives of indeterminism in Polish postwar art. Winiarski's work was informed by his interest in the relationship between art and science.

Winiarski experimented with chance and probability by composing abstract arrangements of small squares, initially in black-and-white and later in color. Winiarski regarded the anonymous building blocks of a small square as "statistical material" from which to build the surface of the work. In 1966, Winiarski wrote: "My ambition involves attempts at visually recording events and presenting their statistical distributions visually. The multitude of possibilities that such treatment of the image offers fascinates me". In 1995 he received Jan Cybis Award. According to art historian and critic Bożena Kowalska, Ryszard Winiarski was among the most influential Polish artists in the second half of the twentieth century. Winiarski died in Warsaw on December 14, 2006, at the age of 70 following a long illness.