Bogusław Szwacz

(1912 – 2009)

Painter, draughtsman, and senior lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
In 1930 he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. In the ‘40s he got involved with the Grupa Młodych Plastyków (the Society of Young Artists) — a group centered around Tadeusz Kantor.

At the turn of 1947 and 1948, Szwacz got a state scholarship and left for Paris, where he encountered and worked along with members of the Le Surréalisme Révolutionnaire group. After his return to Poland, for a short time period, the artist created propagandist works in service of the communist rule. In 1955 in the Związek Literatów (Warsaw Writers Society) exclusively his abstract works executed between 1949 and 1955 were displayed. Ever since, the artist would focus on the abstract forms, drawing from cubism and informel. By applying paint, he strove to render human emotions, states of mind and metaphysical issues; relation of a human being with the universe, the reality one lives within, as well as their role and place in it.