Ondre Nowakowski

 

Artist Biography

 

Ondre Nowakowski studied Fine Art between 1979 and 1984.

He emerged from his studies in Staffordshire and Manchester with a First Class Honours degree and Master of Arts in Fine Art.

 

Between 1984 and 1998 he combined a career of university teaching with a successful practice in public art.

In 1995 he was made Head of Visual Arts at the Alsager Faculty of the Manchester Metropolitan University.

 

Since 1998 he has been working as a full-time freelance artist. He has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally with works held in public collections including numerous large scale public art works in the UK.

 

Exhibitions of note include: The Laznia Centre for Contemporary Arts Gdansk,

The Estonian Academy of Arts, Albert Dock Grand Hall Liverpool, The Chicago Atheneum, The Courtauld Institute of Art and the ICA London. 

 

Elected to the Royal Cambrian Academy in 2017.

 

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Artist Statement

 

I am fascinated with the ways that everyday experiences, objects, and observations have the potential to become iconic and symbolic. 

 

These days I use a camera, paint, drawing media and just about anything else to construct what I think of as ‘art propositions’. I collect impressions of things that rouse my curiosity. I look for the extraordinary in the ordinary and the unfamiliar in the familiar. I use media to make concrete equivalents of what are otherwise solely internal notions. The  process tends to raise questions: What is it that makes the remarkable, remarkable? How do we escape the containment of our own subjectivity?  What does it mean to be poetic?.  

 

I believe that all art is essentially in one form or other a kind of poetry and that artists make poetic propositions. The practical results for me involve combining my own structured personal view of the world with a regime of absorbing, developing, testing and then ultimately sharing ideas with others using creative media.