Karol Bąk (born in 1961) - painter, ilustrator, drawer.
Inn years 1984-1989 he studied at the State School of Fine Arts (now ASP) in Poznan, at the Graphic Art Department. He completed his studies with two prized diplomas, at prof. Tadeusz Jackowski's graphic studio, and at prof. Jarosław Kozłowski's drawing studio.
Awards:
- award for graphics "Diploma89", Torun 1989
- I award and Jan Wroniecki medal, "XXI Post-competition exhibition - The best graphic art and drawing of the year".
After studies completion he deal with copperplate engraving and drawing. For the next few years he was busy with designing and took part in his artistic travels. In the second half of the 90s he started to paint on canvas, and from 2000 he has been engaged in it professionally. The artist's works combine the following subject cycles as: "Sailing-ship", "Dialogs", "Cocoons", "Aureoles", "Four elements", "Judyta and Salome". His works we displayed on a dozen or so individual exhibition, and on group exhibitions, mainly in Poland, Germany, and Holland. Nowadays he deals with easel painting and wall-painting, applied graphics, and also designing, and interior decoration.
Karol Bąk - is the painter of beautiful women, dragons and unicorns.
He is familiar for thinking vividly and synthetically in other to reach out the symbolic language of the previous ages, beyond the limits of the word. According to his drawings, graphics and pictures we learn that his opinion on the way of thinking notionally-analytically we have got accustomed for every day, should be developed by mythical thinking expressed in pictures and parables. Addressing to intuition and fantasy, he reaches out to everlasting truths which are hidden beyond the reality surface.
The artist started with graphic which have brought him the intellectual basis. We can find in them his inspiration sources and projects developed later either in the series The Sailing ship or in individual art pieces like The Dreaming pearls, where he examines somehow the problem of squaring of the circle. Technical thinking - rather seldom noticeable in the artist's reach oil canvases - anyway based on exact data has been used by the author so far. Two significant copperplate engravings - Triangle secret and Circle secret have started this technical thinking. In the first, the author based his idea of the geometrical figure, and at the same time synthetically interpreted how people used to transfer the triangle into their eternal purposes (ziggurats, Egyptian pyramids, and others). In the second copperplate engraving on the mental plan - parts of planets peripheries showing their distance from the Earth; and on the visual plan - the artist illustrated man's violent expansion towards the inner part of planet ant outside of it (into the space) what was presented in the way of two paths, and the Earth - sphere, the ideal figure "growing all over" by unlimited buildings. In the artist's graphics and drawings we have already noticed the most significant features of Bąk's arts - anthropomorfization of matter and linking it with the background; erogenous parts of the body; and characteristic dichotomy: light-dark, right-wrong, human-animal, real-unreal (fantasy). These features are noticeable both in his applied painting (wall-painting, illusive composition) and also in so called clear painting, which seems to be nowadays his priority task to spend more time and energy. Now, Bąk, admirer of women and glorifier of womanhood, paints situational persons. His intention is to reach out into the female's soul through her body and limited accessories. Thus, he penetrates their inside parts using various methods.
His seraphic heroines flow in the dream, appear in immense space; they are angels, pearl-divers, personification of elements and winds, incarnated murders (Judith, Salome), and even death (Thanatos); from time to time their dimension is galactic - they are super new or Milky Way.
In this type of painting it seems to be important that the Poznan artist exploring modern women, and presenting their spiritual conditions wishes, with positive or negative energy arising from them, at the same time appoints them to roles: biblical, mythological or personifying elements. Thus, there is certain theatrical ness of poses, artificiality, and intentional decorative value. In most of the art works we can notice one elegant person who is characterized by her cloths, and lately by the super enlarged head-dress in style of aureole, nimbus, and halo. In the last case the author materializes what is invisible. Additionally, in various ways he "attaches" the woman to the picture's background, who sometimes like The Dreaming pearls appears in several spheres.
Bąk characterizes woman not only through showing settings of their bodies, gestures and faces, but also lately by enlarged, sometimes not complete, ovals which surround the person's head. This is the painting continuation of studies which were the beginning of the artist's graphics Circle secret. These circle elements not only decorate the heroines of the paintings, for in particular way they present them in detail, for example a ball of thread and confused ways of labyrinth (Ariadna II), solar ring (Rose Mundi), flame explosive and unearthly countryside (Ignes II), and at the same time they make us to think over these subjects.
Looking at the compositions painted not late age, in terms of form, it is visible that the circle, energetic source, break limits of the square size (size of the works); enters into the presented matters, body and person.
"We can say - according to the artist - that the square and circle coexist like yin and yang; they are opposite themselves, and at the same time they supplement on another. In this we can see metaphysics."
Oil canvases, in the first contact with them, appear and influence the viewers with their visual side. They fascinate with bright and sensual beauty; lure both by the way the female body is presented, as well as luminosity-chromatic expressions, it means optics of the picture, which could be considered as gorgeous without the communicates senses. Beauty, however, as it was states by John Wolfgang Goethe is "... graceful, noble harmony of everything, what is admired directly, and discussion and thinking is not required."