Ryszard Winiarski

Ryszard Winiarski (1936, Lviv - 2006, Warsaw), a Polish painter, stage designer and author of spatial forms. A Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. A winner of Jan Cybis Award (1996). He was one of the major representatives of indeterminism in art. He held both a Master of Science degree as well as a degree in the Master of Arts.
Winiarski's art practice is based on mathematics and science. In his opinion, it was possible to build bridges between life, science, technology and art." He did not create "images" but "areas," which came into being through increasingly more complicated functions of random variables. At the same time the selected method allowed the artist to diversify techniques: he made three-dimensional, relief, kinetic, colourful objects. A project of arranging the interior of an individual exhibition in Zachęta National Gallery of Art as a monumental, prostrate image was a large-scale experiment (1970).
Polish art critic and historian Mieczysław Porębski wrote in the introduction to the catalogue for the first individual exhibition of Winiarski (Contemporary Gallery, Warsaw, 1967) as follows: "There is also the language of mathematics. If I try to learn it, I do not do it because of snobbery or pedantry. Simply it seems to me that – at our age – it is not possible to express certain matters which I find interesting and care for in a different language. Not merely express. More: see. I cannot agree that there is such a language and that I would be forced to capitulate before it in advance. If engineers, biologists, economics can use it – it is not right that philosophers, linguists, art critics, artists cannot make expressions in it".
Ryszard Winiarski’s works were presented at more than 500 collective exhibitions in Poland and abroad, including Canada, Colombia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Portugal, Greece, Italy, India, Norway, Romania, Switzerland, Sweden, USA, Venezuela, Spain. Major exhibitions: International Biennial in Sao Paulo (1969, 1971), Constructivist Biennial in Nuremberg (1969, 1971), Symposium in Gorinchem (1974), Historical Aspects of Constructivism, Düsseldorf (1977), System and Coincidence, Stuttgart (1978), Polish Avant-Garde, Edinburgh, Glasgow (1979), Construction in Progress, Łódź (1981), The Language of Geometry, Warsaw (1984), “Doppelte Identität,” Wiesbaden (1991), Das offene Bild, Münster (1992), Polnische Avantgarde 1930-1990, Berlin (1992), Reduktivismus, Vienna (1992).
Ryszard Winiarski’s pieces can be found in the Museum of Art in Łódź, National Museums in Warsaw, Wrocław, Kraków and Poznań, the National Gallery of Art “Zachęta” in Warsaw, the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, District Museums in Bydgoszcz and Chełm, the Museum of Bochum, the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen, the National Galerie Berlin West, MOCA Los Angeles, the McCeory collection in New York, the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, the Soto Museum in Venezuela and numerous museum and private collections.

(text partly from https://monoskop.org/Ryszard_Winiarski)