Today we reveal the path of Ryszard Winiarski, who became an artist and teacher of everything thinking that it was possible to build bridges between life, science, technology and art". Likewise, he did not create "images", but "areas", which arose through functions increasingly complicated series of random variables.
Born in 1936, he was an artist who through his works sought to combine art and science, striving to transfer notions from the fields of mathematics, statistics and logic to the visual arts. As a result, in the 1960s he decided to erase personal and human intervention from his compositions and to delve into scientific facts and rules.
Before beginning his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts de Warsaw, graduated from Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Technological University de Warsaw, where he defended a thesis on hydraulic/pneumatic transmitters.
Source: Flickr
While studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, worked as technical director at the Stelmos gasket factory. Throughout his artistic career, he sought to integrate art with the sciences.
One of his scheduled painting exhibitions included the participation of the public in the creative process through games of his own design. In the 1980s he concluded that software-based painting systems had reached his limits and began to revise his artistic conceptions.
He began by drawing on intuition, subjective experiences and emotions in his works.
In the period 1953-1955, Winiarski studied at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Technological University de Łódź, and then, between 1955 and 1959, in the Faculty of Precision Mechanical Engineering of the Technological University de Warsawwhere he obtained a Master of Science.
From 1955 he attended the classes of Zofia Matuszczyk-Cyganska at an arts center in the Muranów neighborhood of Warsaw. In 1958, she began attending the workshop of Alexander Kobzdej in the Academy of Fine Arts de Warsaw as a student auditor, where he studied in 1960 at the Faculty of Painting, under the supervision of Stanisław Szczepański, Jan Wodyński and Aleksander Kobzdej.
In addition, he studied stage design with Wladyslaw Daszewski and typography with Julian Palka. At the end of his studies he participated in the seminar dedicated to the relationship between science and art dictated by Mieczysław Porębski.
In 1966 he completed his studies with the diploma thesis Event-Information-Image, which constituted a theoretical interpretation for the series of paintings Attempts to Visually Represent Statistical Distributions. In the same year, Winiarski received the main prize at the 1st Symposium of Artists and Scientists "Art in the Changing World" in Puławy for an innovative theoretical concept executed through art.
From that moment, Ryszard Winiarski persistently followed his own original artistic program, whose only subject was "selected mathematical problems, statistics, games, fortune, and other objective and logical processes."
Later, the artist "tried to use in his artistic work nomenclature and signaling derived from mathematics, and more precisely from statistics and information theory.
At the same time, the selected method allowed the artist to diversify the techniques: he made three-dimensional objects, in embossed, kinetic, colorful. A project to organize the interior of a solo exhibition at the Zachęta National Art Gallery as a monumental and prostrate image is an example of one of his many large-scale experiments (1970).
Before his death, Winiarski had completed more than fifty stage and television set design projects, most of them for the polish theater de Warsaw.
To design a purely unambiguous code, he distilled his color palette in black and white, which is reminiscent of the binary system of zeros and ones.
Personally, he felt that his message had to be precise, succinct and direct; the only subjects of his paintings were "selected mathematical problems, statistics, games, fortune, and other objective and logical processes."
Died in 2006, in Warsaw, Poland.
