Klimowski Poster Book

“He leads the field by a very long furlong, out on his own, making his own weather. He is Klimowski, unafraid.”—Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize-winning playwright 

In the mid-1970s, Andrzej Klimowski's fearlessly original artwork caught the eye of leading Polish theater and film companies, for whom he designed some of the period's most iconic posters. The London-born artist, who moved to Poland at a time when many East Europeans dreamed of going West, went on to create posters for works by filmmakers and playwrights from Scorsese to Altman, Beckett to Brecht.

Drawing on folk art and Polish Surrealism, Klimowski uses techniques including photomontage and linocut to create posters that are filled with metaphor, drama, and originality.
 

Andrzej Klimowski (b. 1949) studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London and at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. He has designed posters for theaters and film distributors in Poland, and book covers and illustrations for publishers in the UK. He collaborated with Danusia Schejbal on graphic novel adaptations of The Master and Margarita and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published by SelfMadeHero. His own graphic novels include The Depository, The Secret, and Horace Dorlan. From 2006 to 2014, Klimowski was professor of illustration at the Royal College of Art in London.

David Crowley is Professor and Head of Critical Writing in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art in London. A graduate of the Royal College in London and the Kraków Academy of Art, Poland, he is an expert in the art and design histories of Eastern Europe under communist rule. He writes regularly on design and is the author of Cold War Posters, Warsaw, and many other books. Crowley has curated exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum (Cold War Modern) and the Muzeum Sztuki in Lódz (Sounding the Body Electric: Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1957-1984). In 2016 he curated the Warsaw International Poster Biennale exhibition.