Andrzej Maria Borkowski was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1949, and immigrated to London, England in 1982 at the invitation of the Hesitate & Demonstrate theatre company and to escape martial law in his homeland. Educated at the Courtauld Institute of Art (1987–88) and the London College of Printing, Borkowski co-founded the Bigos group for artists of Polish origin (1986–98). In addition to holding a senior lectureship position in the Faculty of Art at the University of Brighton for many years, Borkowski is a practicing artist who works with various media, including printmaking, drawing, collage, and reversed painting on glass (a traditional Polish technique); he is also a writer on art in both English and Polish.
Artist, performer, lecturer, writer and art critic, Andrzej Maria Borkowski was born in Warsaw, Poland on 29 September 1949. He studied at the University of Warsaw between 1967 and 1971, later gaining an MA in Art History (1974-75). In 1973 he co-founded Warsaw-based experimental theatre and art group Akademia Ruchu. After English film and theatre director Steven Rumblelow visited Poland in 1976, Borkowski was invited to participate in Rumblelow’s Triple Action, a traveling theatre group based in Newark, England, which performed at British universities. After a year, Borkowski left Triple Action, joining a commune of creative South African immigrants in Hampstead, north London. There, he was invited by cinematographer Oliver Stapleton to participate in Red Square Noon (1977), a film based on the 1972 book of the same name by Russian dissident Natalia Gorbaniewska, who - after protesting against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by four Warsaw Pact countries (including Poland) - based her text around the subsequent trial of the demonstrators. Aware of his imminent return to Poland, Borkowski performed under the pseudonym Andrei Agbar.
After a period of teaching art history in Gdańsk and Warsaw, Borkowski returned to England in 1981, following an invitation to collaborate with Cardiff Laboratory Theatre. In a summer festival in Leicester, Borkowski participated in various performances with the company, including a street parade recreating the 1936 Jarrow March. Spending the rest of the summer in London, Borkowski met Geraldine Pilgrim, director of theatre company, Hesitate & Demonstrate, for whom he held workshops. Receiving no other employment offers, Borkowski returned to Poland, only to be invited back swiftly by Pilgrim to work more fully with her again. Seeking to escape (and being impeded by) the conditions of Poland’s martial law, introduced in December 1981 to regulate and demoralise political demonstrators, Borkowski was only able to return to England in 1982. In his first two years back in England, Borkowski acted with Hesitate & Demonstrate, co-created scripts and designed and made scenery. The company toured across England, to Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Granada and the USA, collaborating closely with the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. After 1984, Borkowski worked with other alternative theatre companies. At this time, he met South African-born poet, novelist and playwright Deborah Levy at London’s Oval Theatre, subsequently playing all three male roles in the world premiere of her play Clam (1985). Borkowski also played the role of Andrzej in Mike Figgis’ feature film debut Stormy Monday (1988), alongside Melanie Griffith, Tommy Lee Jones, Sean Bean and Sting.
Alongside his acting and involvement in theatre, in the mid -1980s Borkowski began art writing, criticism and exhibiting. He worked for the Polish section of the BBC World Service, and in 1986 he began reviewing exhibitions for newspapers such as the London-based Tydzień Polski (now Dziennik Polski). In the same year, with Anglo-Polish artists, writers and activists, Stefan Szczelkun and Kasia Januszko, Borkowski co-formed Bigos, a collective whose members comprised artists of Polish origin. Holding their first exhibition of 23 artists at Brixton Gallery, Bigos aimed to offer an 'insight into the émigré experience but also release Polish creativity in the evolution of British and Euro culture' (Szczelkun, Bigos: Artists of Polish Origin, 1986). Borkowski also obtained an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (1987–88). Borkowski initially exhibited structures made from cardboard pipes and boxes, intended to speak to issues of home, homelessness and Polish legend. Over the following 12 years, he exhibited with Bigos in various shows in London, Worcester, Abingdon, Bradford and Huddersfield. With titles such as Aliens, On Common Ground, Crossing Borders, and Foreign Bodies, Bigos directly addressed issues of identity and culture. Their last exhibition, Constellation Bigos, was held at the Polish Cultural Institute in London in 1997. Borkowski also showed regularly with the Association of Polish Artists in Great Britain (APA).
In 1995, Borkowski became a senior lecturer in the University of Brighton’s Faculty of Arts, where he remained for more than 20 years. His later works embraced various techniques, including screenprinting, etching, photography, mono-printing and reverse painting on glass (a ‘naive’ technique popular in Poland that had declined considerably). He also wrote on Polish paper sculpture, another traditional technique (1995). Ambit magazine reproduced a selection of his etchings in 1997 and his self-portrait-shadows (using photography) in 2011. Borkowski’s work has been exhibited widely in London group shows including at POSK (2013, with his late partner, Halina Nekanda-Trepka), Montage Gallery (2016) and Studio Ex Purgamento (2017–18 and 2019). In 2017 his work featured in Ben Uri's exhibition Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain. He has also written on art regularly for Tydzien Polski. Having left London during the pandemic of 2020–22, Borkowski lives and works in Brighton. His work is not currently held in any UK public collections.