Włodzimierz Pawlak was born in Korytów in 1957. After studying at a technical secondary school (1972-1978), he audited classes at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1979-1980). He eventually entered the institution, studying in various studios for the next five years, before graduating in 1985. The year following his graduation, he immediately began teaching at the Academy’s Department of Industrial Design.
While still a student, he joined the Gruppa collective in late 1982, participating in a large majority of their exhibitions. From 1984 onwards, he published Gruppa’s Oj dobrze już (Oh, It’s All Right Now) magazine, featuring poetry, manifestos and the like. This intellectual stimulation and growth established him as an artist sensitive to social and political entanglements at the time of martial law, eager to produce a metaphorical commentary on his immediate and not-so-immediate context.
In the late 1980s, a group of paintings – Nie mówię, nie widzę, nie słyszę (‘I don’t speak, I don’t see, I don’t hear’), Skąd przychodzimy, kim jesteśmy, dokąd idziemy (‘Where do we come from, who are we, where are we going’) and Łamanie szklanych rurek (‘Breaking glass tubes’) – showcased the process of covering compositions with a layer of paint, a technique originally used in transfer and preservation procedures in the field of art. He adapted this form radically in the series Didactic Tables (1987-1988), using graphic grids of ideograms, charts, maps, symbols of knowledge and culture, and recognisable objects.
Immediately after this cycle, Pawlak underwent a period during which he created formally homogeneous, largely abstract compositions. At the same time, he adopted the technique of collage, creating assemblages of tubes of used paint, broken pencils, tickets, bills, matchboxes, postcards and other miscellaneous objects.
In the early 1990s, Pawlak produced a series of colour-focused monochromatic paintings. The series began with the colour white (a colour that would inspire other phases of his process), before being expanded to include other colours. In this decade, Pawlak took a growing interest in the art and theory of Polish and Russian constructivists such as Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński and Kazimierz Malewicz.
In 1990, Pawlak won the Grand Prix at the International Painting Festival in Cagnes-sur-Mer.
Pawlak lives and works between Korytów and Warsaw.
