Waldemar Swierzy, Capo di tutti capi, 2010

gouache, watercolor, ink, paper, 31.5 x 24.5 cm signed l.d.: Świerzy

Provenance: purchased directly from the artist, private collection, Czestochowa

Waldemar Swierzy, poster artist, graphic designer, book illustrator. Author, among other things, of the wrappers for the excellent PIW series Contemporary World Prose. He also designed album covers, calendars and postage stamps. As an exhibitor, he prepared graphic covers for Polish pavilions at International Fairs in New York, Leipzig, Vienna, Casablanca and Poznan, among others.
He was born in Katowice, Poland. He studied from 1947 to 1952 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow (Graphics Department in Katowice). He studied painting with Prof. Rafał Pomorski, and graphic design with Prof. Józef Mroszczak. Since 1965, he took up teaching work at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznan as head of the Graphic Design Studio. In 1970 he gave a series of lectures for graphic designers in Havana, in 1979-1980 at the University of Mexico, and in 1985 he taught at the Hochschule der Kunste in West Berlin. In 1979 he became chairman of the International Poster Biennale in Warsaw. In 1994, he took over the poster studio at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.
In 1959 he was awarded the Toulouse-Lautrec Grand Prix at the 1st International Exhibition of Film Posters in Versailles for his poster The Red Inn, and in 1962 at the same exhibition he won third prize for his poster Two Floors of Happiness. In 1970, he was awarded the 1st Prix of the 10th Biennale de Sao Paulo. In 1975 and 1985, he won first prize at the Hollywood Reporter's Film Poster Competition in Los Angeles (Promised Land and War Dogs).
In 1997, Swierzy received an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. He was a member of the prestigious Aliance Graphique Internationale (AIG).
His works can be found, among others, in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Kunstbiblothek in Berlin, the Hermitage in Leningrad, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the National Museum in Poznań, the Poster Museum in Wilanów and many other prestigious museums around the world and in Poland.
Waldemar Swierzy belonged to the inner circle of the most outstanding Polish poster designers, and is one of the creators of the "Polish poster school" of the 1960s and 1970s. As he himself has repeatedly emphasized in interviews, his choice of future profession was strongly influenced in his case by his studies in the studio of a great graphic designer and educator, Jozef Mroszczak. It was he who persuaded Swierzy to move to Warsaw right after his diploma, where he offered him a job in the graphics department of the Artistic-Graphic Publishing House (later renamed the National Publishing Agency), which the artist continued for many years.
Swierzy is the author of an impressive, if not record-breaking number of posters, having created more than one and a half thousand of them. The popularity of his works is evidenced by the fact that the poster for Mazowsze (1954) was reproduced in a million pieces. The artist mainly designed cultural posters (theater, film, circus and music), but his oeuvre also includes works with a social message or promoting sports.