Andrzej Jackowski was born to Polish war refugees in Penley camp, Wrexham, North Wales in 1947. He studied painting at various institutions between 1966 and 1977, including Falmouth School of Art and the Royal College of Art. As well as his long-standing position as Professor of Painting at the University of Brighton, Jackowski is known for his imagery that explore loss, identity, alienation and past trauma.
Painter, printmaker and teacher, Andrzej Jackowski was born to Polish war refugees in Penley camp (in an area that became known as 'Little Poland'), in Wrexham, North Wales in 1947. He spent the first 11 years of his life in the camp, close to the English/Welsh border, in wooden huts covered in tar, where Polish was predominantly spoken, and his parents carried cards identifying them as ‘aliens’. Jackowski and his brother were sent to Nottingham to learn English, after which the family then moved to London. Jackowski’s parents separated when he was 14, the same age he produced his first self-portrait and decided to become a painter. He studied at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, London from 1966–69, Falmouth School of Art, Cornwall from 1972–73 and the Royal College of Art, London from 1974–77. He produced the magazine Eleven 32 with David Drain during his last two years as a student and was the recipient of the Abbey Minor Travelling Scholarship, Rodney Burn Award and John Minton Scholarship. Between 1978 and 1979 Jackowski was artist-in-residence at the University of Surrey and was a prize-winner at Tolly Cobbold Eastern Arts in 1981.
Largely autobiographical, Jackowski’s work speaks to his early childhood memories and recollections of a family history in Poland, and the feeling of alienation and enclosure that these experiences aroused. He held many solo exhibitions, including at Moira Kelly Fine Art, London in 1982, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool in 1984, and Marlborough Fine Art, London in 1989. He began teaching painting at University of Brighton in 1987, and in 1988 he was represented in the Royal College of Art’s Exhibition Road Show, by which time he had been on staff for three years. Gaining further recognition, Jackowski was first prize-winner at the John Moores Exhibition 17 at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool in 1991 with his painting The Beekeeper’s Son. The painting, which shows a horizontal figure amidst a sky of terracotta looming over a blue seascape below, was described by the artist as a ‘rich terrain full of desire and fear, intimacy and distance, dark flesh and dead fruit’ (Paul Mellon Centre, 2017). Emblematic of Jackowski’s wider reputation for creating ‘a kind of contemporary ‘history painting’’, his drawings and paintings often address the tragic and defining events of the modern era: ‘the concentration camps; the war and its displacement of populations; the tragic fate of Eastern Europe’ (Hyman et al., 2009). Jackowski has also worked as a printmaker and creator of artist's books, including Time of the Dream, illustrated with a suite of etchings, for Paupers Press (2015).
In the 1990s Jackowski began a long-standing collaboration with commercial gallery, Purdy Hicks, in London. His solo shows there have included Reveries of Dispossession in 1994, Albums and Aliens in 1997 and Stored in 1999. In 2002 he was promoted to Professor of Painting at the University of Brighton. Signalling his increasing recognition as a painter, a year later he presented Andrzej Jackowski: Drawing Retrospective 1963–2003 at Purdy Hicks, which then toured to the University of Northumbria Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne and University of Brighton Gallery in Sussex. The exhibition included over 80 works on paper spanning the previous 40 years of his work, the artist describing them as fluctuating ‘between a kind of vigilant dreaming and being wide awake’. Explaining his childhood desire to ‘break the spell of natural representation’, he continued that ‘it took me several years to find these powerful, insistent and significant images which derive from the cellars of the human memory and psyche, both my own and something more collective. These images are poetic metaphors for something real, intimate and mysterious in our lives’ (Evening Chronicle, 2003).
Jackowski has since continued to teach and exhibit his works, having numerous solo shows with Purdy Hicks, including Andrzej Jackowski: Time of the Dream in 2014–15 and Andrzej Jackowski: A Space in the Dark in 2017. He continues to live and work in Brighton, maintaining his painterly explorations of dispossession, loss and identity. His works can be found in UK public collections including the British Museum, Walker Art Gallery and the British Council Collection.