Andrzej Klimowski was born to Polish immigrant parents in London, England in 1949. He studied at Saint Martin's School of Art in London between 1968–72 and the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts between 1973–75. Klimowski is known for his photocollage designs for film and theatre posters as well as his illustrations for graphic novels.
Painter, graphic artist, illustrator and lecturer, Andrzej Klimowski was born to Polish immigrant parents in London, England on 1 July 1949. Prior to their immigration, his parents ran an archive of the Polish Underground State, and during the Second World War his father was an officer for the Home Army. Klimowski visited Poland when he was 11 and, finding that life was very different from that in England, the event was ‘decisive in forming my imagination’, he later said (Giżka, 2010). Between 1968–72 he studied sculpture and painting at St Martin’s School of Art in London, moving to Warsaw to study poster design under Professor Henryk Tomaszewski and animation under Kazimierz Urbański at the Academy of Fine Arts between 1973–75. He lived and worked in the city for another five years, and produced many film, cinema and theatre posters. Inspired by ‘the Polish School emphasis on individual interpretation over corporate branding’, Klimowski ‘worked with photocollage rather than paint to produce his thrillingly dynamic images’ (Curry, 2017). In Warsaw he also met his future wife and collaborator, Danuta Schejbal, also born in London. In the context of rising political tensions in Poland, the couple returned to London in 1980, where Klimowski immediately began work at an art school.
Having established his photocollage technique in Poland, Klimowski continued to use this in his posters for the Royal Court Theatre and independent film distributor, Artificial Eye, but due to England having ‘a limited taste for poster art, with few outlets’, these ‘quickly tailed off’ (Poyner, 1994). Between 1981 and 1989 Klimowski taught printmaking and graphic design at the College of Art, Canterbury and at West Surrey College of Art and Design between 1982 and 1984, prior to teaching graphic design and illustration at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London from 1984. Around this time, he began freelance work with publishers, Faber & Faber and Penguin Books and the Guardian newspaper. He notably created collages of fragmented bodies, reflecting the Cold War, as his cover designs for the Penguin editions of Milan Kundera’s novels in the 1980s and early 1990s. He won the Daily Telegraph Award for Excellence in Press Campaign for British Telecom in 1988.
In the mid-1990s Klimowski’s career as a teacher and graphic illustrator gained further traction. He was made a fellow of the RCA in 1995 and was promoted to Professor of Illustration in 1997. In 1994 he published his first graphic novel with Faber & Faber, The Depository: A Dream Book, a wordless novel that combined nightmarish images to produce a visual thriller with political overtones, described by the artist as ‘a contemporary silent movie’ (Poyner, 1994). The novel signalled a new chapter in Klimowski's artistic practice and he produced two further graphic novels with Faber & Faber: The Secret in 2002, for which he held a celebratory exhibition at London’s Polish Cultural Institute (2002), and Horace Dorlan in 2007, for which he won second prize in the 2008 V&A Illustration Awards. He also worked on animated film versions for The Depository and The Secret, in 2003 and 2004 respectively. Beside his publications and awards, in 2002 Klimowski: A Retrospective Exhibition was held at the National Theatre in London. Richard Cork, writing in The Times, described the ‘remarkable’ achievement of the artist, and quoted Harold Pinter, the playwright and director, who claimed that Klimowski ‘[...] leads the field by a very long furlong’ (Cork, 2002). Invited to discuss the future of graphic novels on an artist's panel at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in 2007, Klimowski subsequently worked with London-based publishers SelfMadeHero to continue publishing graphic novels. With his wife, he produced The Master and Margarita: A Graphic Novel in 2008, based on the 1967 novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. Neel Mukherjee of The Times noted that it showcased Klimowski as ‘one of the great illustrators of our time’ (Mukherjee, 2008). Klimowski has since published other works and illustrated texts by other writers, including Deborah Levy’s Stardust Nation (2016), of which the Jewish Chronicle wrote that ‘Klimowski’s art enhances the epigrammatic qualities of Levy’s prose’ (Garlitz, 2016). In the same year, Klimowski’s show, What Ho! Andrzej Klimowski's Illustrations for P.G. Wodehouse, was held at the London Print Studio, where he also created an installation with Lutz Becker and John Phillips for What is to be Done? Russian Arts and Design 1917-28 the following year. His Klimowski Poster Book was published by SelfMadeHero in 2018. He once described himself as a ‘British artist’ with the ‘iconography of Central or Eastern Europe’ coded within his work (Giżka, 2010). Andrzej Klimowski lives and works in London. His work is in UK public collections including the V&A, London. His cover designs for Milan Kundera featured in Ben Uri's survey Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain (2017).