Ryszard Grzyb was born in Sosnowiec in 1956. He studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław under Zbigniew Karpiński (1976-1979) and at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw under Rajmund Ziemski (1979-1981). A producer of neo-expressionist paintings at the time, the classrooms he frequented were populated with important peers and colleagues-to-be.
Indeed, in 1982, Grzyb joined the freshly founded forward-thinking collective Gruppa alongside Paweł Kowalewski, Jarosław Modzelewski, Włodzimierz Pawlak, Marek Sobczyk and Ryszard Woźni – all former classmates. Grzyb’s contribution mainly lay in his co-founding of the group’s offshoot publication Oj dobrze już (Oh, It’s All Right Now), exemplifying a literary curiosity and poetic appetite that has accompanied his entire body of work.
During this formative period, several trips abroad expanded Grzyb’s horizons. In 1986 he travelled on a scholarship to West Berlin; in 1991 he was invited to Cologne; in 1995 he returned to Germany thanks to the Lamspringe scholarship; in 1996 he was invited to Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. In between these trips, Grzyb’s technique evolved substantially. From 1987 onwards, his habitual tempera painting on cardboard gradually shifted towards oil painting on canvas favouring a renewed chromatic approach.
This new technique engendered new themes and subjects that followed each other chronologically. Diaphanous colours were now sharp and flat, their formally organic contours underlined by thick, dark, straight outlines. The figures depicted grew progressively more fantastical, human-animal hybrids often caught in open conflict or suffering various struggles that can be read as warnings or allegories. More symbolic motifs appeared, such as masks, which inevitably introduced more morbid compositions. Explicit eroticism – sometimes bordering on the scatological – was used concurrently as a form of socio-political commentary.
Grzyb developed a literary corpus in parallel to his visual corpus. Its roots can be traced back to the artist’s early years in Wrocław, where he published in Nowy Wyraz (1980, 1981), Miesięcznik Literacki (1981), in the journal Oj dobrze już (Oh, It’s All Right Now), and in the publication Sztuka Nowoczesnej. Further publications include What’s up, edited by M. Sitkowska (Warsaw, 1989), and Young Poets of a New Poland (London, 1993), and appear in the art magazine Tytuł roboczy (2004). His Zdania Napowietrzne – a collection of absurd multimedia haikus – was published by Świat Literacki (2005). His collection of poems Ja chrząszcz was published by the Tymoteusza Karpowicz Foundation for Culture and Education.
