Wacław Szpakowski (1883-1973) was a Polish architect and engineer who created a distinct idiom of abstract drawing, first conceived in notebook sketches in the 1900s and developed systematically in a series of works made with an ink pen on tracing paper between the early 1920s and 1940s. Szpakowski worked in complete isolation, indifferent to the art of his time; yet his project is fundamentally modernist in its aspiration to find the simplest possible means for expressing the underlying order of the universe, one that approaches a scientific investigation in its formal rigor and systematic nature. Calling his works “drawings of linear ideas,” Szpakowski created symmetrical patterns of a continuous geometric line; invariably 1 mm thick and 4 mm apart, it always starts on the left side of the page and ends on the right. For Szpakowski, the line’s relentless trajectory across the surface of each sheet is merely a fragment of its endless rhythmical movement through space and time. He invited viewers to ‘decipher’ what he called ‘the inner content’ of his drawings by following the course of the ‘broken line’ across the surface of the page, “just like one composes the words of a text out of individual letters.”
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WACLAW SZPAKOWSKI (1883–1973) was born in Warsaw in 1883. Although he never exhibited work during his lifetime, he has since been recognized as a forerunner of geometric abstraction in art. The first exhibition of his works took place in the Muzeum Sztuki in Lódz in 1978, followed by individual presentations at the National Museum in Warsaw, the City Museum of Wroclaw, Leon Wyczólkowski District Museum in Bydgoszcz, Wilhelm Hack Museum (Ludwigshafen, Germany), Galeria Atelier (Brussels), Galerie Berinson (Berlin), The Baltic Gallery of Art (Ustka), Galeria Awangarda BWA (Wroclaw), Galeria Willa (Lódz), and The Latvian National Museum of Art, among other locations. Additionally, his work has been presented in group exhibitions including Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Muzeum Sztuki (Lódz), Ornament – Seriality, Vasarely Múzeum (Budapest), The Intelligible Non-Violent Art, The Israel Museum (Jerusalem) and Kunststation (Hofbieber-Kleinsassen, Germany), Europe – Concrete – Reductiv, Museum of Architecture (Wroclaw), Vonal, Ernst Múzeum (Budapest), Museum of Art In Lódz 1931 – 1992, Musée d’art contemporain (Lyon), Présences Polonaises, l’art vivant autour du Musée de Lodz, Centre George Pompidou (Paris), and Polish Photography 1839–1979, International Center of Photography (New York), among others. Grounding Vision, a group exhibition featuring 25 Szpakowski drawings presented at Miguel Abreu Gallery in 2017, was the artist’s largest exhibition in the US to date. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Muzeum Sztuki (Lódz, Poland) and the Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga, Latvia). Waclaw Szpakowski 1883 – 1973: Rhythmical Lines, a monograph dedicated to his work, was published in 2016 by Ośrodek Kultury i Sztukiwe Wroclawiu in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title.