Ryszard Wasko, a somewhat legendary Polish artist, has lived and worked in Berlin since 2008. This is not his first period of residency in Germany, just the first time that he has stayed there of his own accord. The previous visit was in 1983, when Wasko was forced to flee Poland in the middle of the night in order to avoid arrest as an outspoken advocate of Solidarity during the early period of martial law. In 1983, Wasko was already well established as a multimedia artist. A graduate of the famous Film Academy in Lodz in the mid-1970s, he had developed a serious body of work as an avant-garde photographer, filmmaker, and video artist. His early cinematic works led the way for many Polish artists to think in terms of sequential and serialized imagery, not only as a temporal extension of Constructivism, but also as a revolutionary parallel to Minimalist and conceptual art in the United States and Western Europe.…see the entire article in the print version of December’s Sculpture magazine.
