Andrej Michael Karwacki – Portraits Art Exhibition – Artist Portfolio Magazine

Artist Portfolio Magazine – 2016 Portraits Art Exhibition

Andrej Micael Karwacki – Berkeley, CA

Born in Poland, Andrzej grew up during the years of political oppression and era of communist Poland. There he attended the School for the Arts and Literature. Unconsciously, these primary years were the platform for a deep attraction towards peace, poetry and art as a form of creative preservation. In 1984, Andrzej moved to New York, he consequently received BFA in painting and earned a Master’s Degree in Urban Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.

After relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1994, Andrzej’s artistic direction began to take shape after integrating Eastern spirituality into his artwork.

While Andrzej’s current studio is based in Berkeley, his paintings are currently exhibited Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Dallas, New York, Boston, Paris, London and Hong Kong. His work is in private collections throughout the United States.

Relying on well-known images of man and women in the context of pop art, Andrzej have pulled together elements from mainstream aesthetics, both past and present, to address transpersonal relationships we have to select images. By juxtaposing the sense of identity with text from newspapers and textiles that speak of the social cultural of various decades and cultures, these paintings attempt to make sense of the world encompassing a wider aspect of humankind and the psyche.

Andrzej’s figure paintings explore ideas of fashion, feminism, human desire for love and beauty. It is Andrzej’s goal to present women not within an objectified framework but women that constitute a dominant key symbol within a wider cultural context.

His figure painting works use variety of media. They are composed of written stories, which by use of newspapers, non-fiction book materials, posters and ads create background and content to an overall theme. They add a second dimension to the composition and to the personal life story of the model. All figures are free hand painted with few monotones thereby creating strong graphic composition. Andrzej often exposes parts of the figure to its background, fusing entire arrangement into a single story. “There is a stunning Warhol-meets fashion-magazine flare to Andrzej’s work”, Carnegie Hill Review, NY, 2009.