Director Skolimowski honoured by Łódź art academy

The honorary doctorate coincides with the opening of a solo exhibition of Skolimowski’s works at the Centre of Art Promotion gallery in Łódź, central Poland.

Since his debut exhibition in Turin in 1996, Skolimowski has had numerous solo shows of his paintings in several European countries, the United States and Canada. He received the main award at the World Exhibition of Modern Art in Los Angeles in 1998.

The Rector of the Łódź Academy, Jolanta Rudzka-Habisiak, said that the doctorate is a tribute to Skolimowski’s versatile creative work, in which painting occupies a special place. Professor Andrzej Marian Bartczak stressed that his large-sized canvasses are born out of an inner need for creation rather than any calculation.

Skolimowski, who is now 76, graduated from the Faculty of Ethnography at Warsaw University at the age of 21, before enrolling at the Łódź Film School. He co-authored a script to Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers, and to the highly-acclaimed debut feature of Roman Polański, Knife in the Water (together with Polański).

His early films – Identification Mark, Barrier, Walkover and Hands Up – represented the so-called ‘new wave’ in Polish cinema.

The 1967 feature Hands Up was banned by the communist censors and did not go on general release until the Solidarity revolution in 1981, with the controversy surrounding the film one of the reasons behind Skolimowski’s decision to emigrate.

Since 1970, he has worked in Italy, France, Britain and the United States, where he lived for many years. He currently lives in the Mazurian Lake District in Poland.

In 2008, Skolimowski made his comeback to film making after a lapse of seventeen years with the highly-acclaimed Four Nights with Anna, followed by the political thriller Essential Killing, which received the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Festival in 2010. (mk/jb)

PAP/Grzegorz Michałowski

Actor Andrzej Chyra checks out Skolimowski's works Photo: PAP/Grzegorz Michałowski

PAP/Grzegorz Michałowski