Jacek Tylicki Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1951 -

Jacek Tylicki is a Polish-born artist, specialized in the field of land and nature art. His conceptual projects often raise social and environmental issues. Video and photography plays an important role in his work as a record of its elusiveness and transience.

Tylicki was born in 1951 in Sopot, Poland. He attended Art Academy of Gdansk as a free listener, and afterwards got his education at the University of Lund in Sweden, studying art history and philosophy. In 1982, Tylicki settled in New York.

Through his art, Tylicki lays a stress upon personal experience bearing witness to artistic truth. He searches on his own account for an authenticity and a fullness of existence in its relation to nature, to other human beings, as well as to himself, and maintains a critical suspiciousness towards the ethical and political models of Western society. The essential element is an autoreflection, which leads Tylicki to a certain critique of social egocentricity and adds some new resonance to the term esthetic disinterestedness, a term introduced to esthetics by Kant, and to which many artists have appealed during the 20th century.

‘Art happens all the time, everywhere. All we have to do is to keep our minds open’, as the artist states. The entire activity of Jacek in the field of art is an attempt to find a normal human answer in a world which tends to be more and more inhuman. His most famous project, Natural Art is originating directly from traditional painting experiments, carried out during his painting studies, which brought Tylicki, in the first half of the seventies, to a certain conception of the painter’s abstraction. Avoiding all control, he spreads out sheets of white paper or canvas in the nature. For some time they stay in the grass, in the rushes of river, in the meadows or in the mountains. Nature registers its presence, covering the surface of the paper with colors, forms and tracks. The process itself is controlled by nature’s intensity, by time and space, substance and causality, and doesn’t depend on man’s interference. The artist’s obligation is not to shape or handicraft, but to understanding the riddles of reality. As nature leaves its tracks on both sides of the canvas or paper, each piece can be viewed from all angles.

Tylicki’s project Free Art, executed in 1987 in Now Gallery, consisted of the free distribution of the works of well-established New York artists. It put in doubt not only the capital parity character of an object of art, but also the commercial principle of profit in an exchange of articles. It’s essence lies not only in the gift as a work of art given by such and such an artist, but a paving of the way for Art’s different, utopian circulation in society.

His nature project led him all around the world, where he exhibited his works of art.

Jacek Tylicki lives and creates in New York and Sopot, Poland