Zbigniew Rybczyński

Zbigniew Rybczyński was born in Łódź, where he spent the first few years of his life, studied and worked after graduating. At the Se-ma-for Studio of Small Film Forms in Łódź, he made his great work Tango. He had several opportunities to return to Łódź after becoming an internationally recognised artist. His star was unveiled on the Łódź Walk of Fame in 1999. In 2008, the Łódź Film School awarded him an honorary doctorate in film art, and that same year he received the Katarzyna Kobro Award. In 2013, the Łódź Film School celebrated its sixty-fifth anniversary, and the exhibition at Atlas Sztuki was one of the projects accompanying the jubilee.

The artist is known above all as the creator of Tango, which won the 1982 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. It was the first Oscar awarded to a Polish film production. In addition to the Oscar, he has received an entire collection of other major distinctions. These include the Grand Prix at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen for Tango, an Emmy Award for The Orchestra, the Silver Lion at Cannes for Imagine, the Golden Gate Award for Kafka, and the Prix Italia for The Orchestra, as well as numerous other prizes for films and videos at festivals and competitions in Kraków, Chicago, Melbourne, Huesca, Oberhausen, Tokyo, San Francisco, Tampere, Ottawa, Annecy, Paris, Milan and Batumi.

The artist has developed solutions in the field of electronic imagery, resulting from research into images and special effects, that have received patent protection in the United States.

Zbigniew Rybczyński has taught at many distinguished institutions around the world, including Columbia University in New York, the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and Joshibi University of Art and Design in Tokyo. From 2009 to 2013, Rybczyński established the Centre for Audiovisual Technologies in Wrocław.

It is true that some time has passed since Rybczyński made his last film, but he continues to work. As he told me himself, “he is at the stage of developing tools for the next film”. He also teaches and writes, and is a great ambassador for Polish film art around the world. The list of places to which he has been invited is impressive. In the last four weeks alone, Zbigniew Rybczyński has given a lecture and taken part in a presentation of his work in Turin, participated as a speaker in an international conference and served on the jury of a film festival in the Hungarian capital. I am delighted that he accepted the invitation from Atlas Sztuki and found the time to prepare an exhibition with us.

In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, we publish two essays on the work of Zbigniew Rybczyński. The first is by the film director Andrzej Barański, with whom Rybczyński created his earliest works while still a student at the Łódź Film School. The second essay is by Siegfried Zielinski, Professor of Media Theory, Archaeology and Variantology of Art and Media at the Berlin University of the Arts. The catalogue is completed by two conversations with Zbigniew Rybczyński. Piotr Krajewski, curator of his exhibitions in Poznań (2009), Wrocław (2009), Berlin (2011) and Karlsruhe (2012), talks to the artist about the nature of creativity, while Rybczyński speaks to the undersigned about life in Poland.

I invite you to see the retrospective exhibition of Zbigniew Rybczyński prepared at Atlas Sztuki by Professor Józef Robakowski. We will show sketches, drawings, paintings, films, videos and a special installation. We will also present old engravings from Zbigniew Rybczyński’s collection, selected by Józef Robakowski. As readers of the catalogue will learn, Rybczyński is also a collector. This is a unique opportunity to discover this side of the artist.