Ryszard Grzyb's Wilderness is an exceptional presentation of works by this outstanding painter and drawer, and co-founder of the famous GRUPPA. On 25 May Zderzak Gallery will show 120 new works on paper by this Warsaw artist. After his move two years ago from a dark and cramped basement on Ursynowa Street to a bright first-floor workshop on Jelonki, Grzyb's painting has caught a breath of fresh air. You can see this fresh air particularly well in the works on paper, and especially in the watercolours, which require a quick hand and technical fluency. The watercolours from the Wilderness series are luminous and sonorous, the paint is spread somewhat differently than in the 90's, with larger patches, generating an effect almost reminiscent of stained glass.   

Wilderness includes animals more and less exotic. One the one hand we have before us household pets, such as rabbits, cats, fish, and Stafik the dog, but right alongside we find rhinoceroses and buffaloes, tortoises and tigers, monkeys, elephants... And we can even come across some otherworldly creatures: a horse-rhinoceros, a dog-flower and a rabbit-like angel. Grzyb's fauna - the work of an excellent colorist - is colorful, vivid and pulsating like the garb of African women. This whole oneiric atlas of animals is available to be seen at the Zderzak exhibit.

In the eighties Ryszard Grzyb made spirited tempera paintings on cardboard, large-format, expressive compositions.  His work back then fell in line with the Neue Wilde movement and was an ironic and sometimes even obscene response to the political climate of the time.  At the start of the nineties Grzyb's art crossed from expression to more decorative compositions.  Animal figures composed in multicoloured mosaics began to dominate his canvases.

The watercolours on display at the Wilderness exhibit are a survey of the motifs that have been reappearing in Ryszard Grzyb's canvases since the 90's, with their color harmony and refined decorative quality.  The drawings on the other hand - often rendered in pencil, and diversified with patches of colour - draw from the wild painting of the start of the artist's career with their expressiveness.  Many of them are interesting experiments in technique.  The drawings are pages from the artist's philosophical and poetical notebooks.

On the occasion of this exhibit, Zderzak Gallery is publishing the largest publication ever devoted to the work of  Ryszard Grzyb: a 212-page album with 120 reproductions of the artist's works on paper, and essays by outstanding critics and curators: Adam Szympans, Joanna Myszkowska, Jaroslaw Szczupak and Michal Pelikan.

RYSZARD GRZYB was born in 1956 in Sosnowiec. He is a painter, poet, and karate fighter. He graduated from the Academy of Arts in Warsaw, and now lives and works in Warsaw.

Ryszard Grzyb's previous one-man exhibits at Zderzak Gallery:
1985 Duel on the Swing
1990 Pictures and Drawings
1991 A Season Abundant with Goodness of Every Kind

Collective exhibitions including Ryszard Grzyb at Zderzak Gallery:
1991 Accrochage 1
2001 The Race of the Red People                                                          
2006 No Landscapes
In 2006 the Silesian Museum in Katowice organized a retrospective exhibition of Ryszard Grzyb's paintings.

The artist's work is found in the collections of: the National Museum in Warsaw, the National Museum in Krakow, the National Museum in Poznan, the Upper Silesian Museum in Bytom, the Regional Museum in Bydgoszcz, the Regional Museum in Torun, Mönchehaus - Museum für Moderne Kunst in Goslar, the Zachita National Contemporary Art Gallery in Warsaw, the Egit Foundation in Warsaw, the Zderzak Gallery collection in Krakow, the Krzysztof Musial Collection, Prokesz Family Collection, the Wojciech Bruszewski Collection, the Andrzej Kwasnik Collection and many others.