Andrzej Jackowski was born in North Wales in 1947. The son of Polish immigrants who fled the horrors of World War II, he was born in a refugee camp near Crewe, where his family were waiting to be repatriated. In this temporary community, Polish culture was alive and thriving, allowing the young Andrzej to experience the language and customs he had been ripped away from. Otherness, however, was difficult to accept: ‘The huts in the camp were made of wood covered in tar. My parents carried a card saying they were aliens’. Repatriation never taking place, Jackowski was sent to Nottingham with his brother to learn English, before settling in London. This move, a new start, coincided with his parents’ separation. Jackowski too made an important decision; he knew he would become an artist.
He attended Camberwell School of Art, Falmouth School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, before obtaining a fellowship to Surrey University. There, during a reading of The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler, a text inspired by the painting The Tower of Copernicus, Jackowski had a practice-defining realisation. Memories of his displaced and isolated ‘childhood’ came flooding back. With them, the trauma and sense of loss and resilience resurfaced. From then on, the artist decided to reconcile his personal childhood experience with the wider, universal topics of dispossession, loss and identity.
As a result, Jackowski’s work is openly autobiographical, drawing on early childhood memories, recollections of his family’s history in their native Poland and resulting feelings of alienation and enclosure that 11 years in a refugee camp engendered. Using these experiences as fertile soil, his psyche became the prism of a collective memory – striking a very delicate balance in using a subjective narrative to depict a collective history.
Jackowski taught painting at the University of Brighton between 1987 and 2013, becoming a Professor of Painting in 2003. He was awarded First Prize in the 1991 John Moores Painting Competition, held at the Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool) for his painting The Beekeeper’s Son.
