Andrzej Jackowski

About Andrzej Jackowski

Andrzej Jackowski's new series of etchings, 'Time of the Dream', are the first results of a year long project commissioned by Paupers Press. Inviting the artist to make a visual diary encompassing a whole year, these new prints are 8 weeks taken out of the 52 that make up the Time of the Dream artists book.

Born a refugee and isolated from mainstream British life for his first 11 years, this formative childhood experience permeates much of his work, underpinning dreamlike vignettes of life as both experienced directly and indirectly memorialised through the family photo album. Primarily a painter of small and intimate works, printmaking allows the artist to develop the stories and narratives of his life, graphically exploring the tradition of visual storytelling evident throughout the European diaspora of the 20th century.

These new works, film stills that move 'with the buried logic of a dream', draw the spectator into a shadowy, theatrical world of memory and reverie, inner spaces of life and death, of disembodiment and sex; a place of things breaking up and being put back together again. Jackowski sees drawing as 'a sort of alphabet: the building blocks of his idiom, of his way of thinking.' A subconscious land distilling the essence of self.

There is no point in trying to plot out a clear story. These images are created by an intuitive processes, not meant to be illustrative, only to evoke. 'The structure of dreams is how I think. It's my fundamental way of looking at the world,' he says, 'because dreams transmogrify the world into forms which one can think about in a more complex way.' Fantasy is another way of looking at reality: that's how fables and stories work. A dream-space etched out of the darkness in which we can all encounter ourselves.

(extracts taken from the exhibition catalogue 'Dreams of Here' by Rachel Campbell-Johnston)