Tomasz Sikorski, a visual artist (painter, graphic designer, performer, creator of objects, edifices, and installations), from his early years related with the Warsaw neo-avantgarde, from the very beginning of his own artistic pursuits occupied with documentation of works and activities of other artists. He has soon realized the novelty of the spontaneous creativity that blossomed on the streets or was brought there by the artists who did not want to close their art in a gallery space. Since the early 1970s, Sikorski has been documenting paintings and other art pieces he has seen on the streets. In Autumn, 1985, he started creating his own stencil graffiti. The photographies he has made since the 1970s till the 1990s now constitutes the significant collection presenting the history of graffiti in the Polish People’s Republic.
Although it is hard to find an explicit line dividing the artistic graffiti from the political one, in his collection’s arrangement, Sikorski separates the photos showing works invested mainly in the artistic dimension from those pictures that depict graffiti in which political content dominated the formal side. In the 1970s, the graffiti in Poland was created by the artists who sought new spaces for their art and thought about exit from the borders of museums and art galleries rather than by political activists. Such artists were Jerzy Treliński, Zygmunt Piotrowski, or Joanna Krzysztoń and Zbigniew Olkiewicz from the Academy of Movement (Akademia Ruchu) theater – for them all graffiti was not the basic nor the vital genre.
The situation changed apparently in the subsequent decade when as a result of the martial law imposition and social polarization the streets of Polish cities became a scene of the uncountable written and graphic messages. The urban iconosphere was full of openly political statements, the ones questioning the legitimization of the communist power and referring to national, romantic rhetorics. However, even in the early 1980s, there was also the graffiti subvertingly challenging both sides of the political conflicts, for instance, the dwarfs painted by ‘Major’ Waldemar Fydrych on the blurs that emerged on the walls as the secret service covered the antigovernment texts and signs. This kind of graffiti mocking the ruling party as well as so-called democratic opposition became popular especially in the late 1980s when the parodistic images of politicians and the acts of overidentification with the system were accompanied with pro-ecological, antiwar, and anarchistic declarations. Dariusz Paczkowski, Egon Fietke, and Krzysztof Skiba were some of the most known artists-activists who created such graffiti.
The second half of the 1980s was characterized by plenty of artistic graffiti as well. The phenomenon was connected with the broader access to the spray paint on the one side and the popularization of the stencil graffiti, and with the helplessness of the militia and secret service toward mass practices of painting on the walls on the other. The artistic graffiti was painted by respected artists with the art schools’ background, such as Sikorski, Paweł Jarodzki, Krzysztof Skarbek and Szymon Urbański, as well as young creators without such formal art education for whom graffiti appeared as an attractive way of raising their own creativeness, such as Aleksander ‘Olo’ Rostocki, Jacek ‘Ponton’ Jankowski, Alexander Sikora and the Association of Peaceful Painters (Towarzystwo Malarzy Pokojowych). Graffiti served for them as a way of taking on new ideas and finding new styles and poetics, what brought about the whole underground graffiti scene integrated by friendship relations, collective creative actions, and fanzines circuit.
Tomasz Sikorski participated in the events and activities of the graffiti scene as an active artist and at the same time photographer documenting the works of others. The photo collection he gathered contains about 1 500 pictures of works by the most estimated creators of both artistic and political graffiti of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the photos of the pieces by less known artists and anonymous ones. The collection is presented during the lectures and photo shows by Sikorski, on exhibitions, and in book publications.
Source:
Tomasz Sikorski, Marcin Rutkiewicz, Graffiti w Polsce 1940-2010, Carta Blanca, Warszawa 2011.
