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Andrzej Klimowski is an artist who always seems to be moving against the tide. In the 1970s, he was living in Poland using collage and photography in his poster designs, when the predominant trend in Polish poster design was painterly-symbolic. During the digital age, a wave of computer-manipulated photographs pervaded graphic design, but Klimowski returned to images made entirely by hand. He himself has said: “with the increasing and almost infinite possibilities of image manipulation offered by the digital media, I consciously decided to move away from photography and embrace the limitations of the more traditional techniques of drawing, painting, and printmaking”.
The Polish film posters designed by Klimowski in the 70’s have become classics. The best of them include Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver”(1977) and Robert Altman’s “Nashville”(1976), whose impact relied on the economic use of collage. The design of the Nashville poster made use of only a few elements: a grainy photographic portrait of a singer, delicately rendered arrows converging towards the centre and a background of red and white stripes. The singer is portrayed in profile with ruffled hair and naked torso, suggestive of the film’s hippie theme, and the arrows are the sights of a rifle. The red and white stripes in the background can be seen as part of the American flag. Here we see a masterly exploitation of graphic signs conveying the essential ideas in Altman’s film – music, hippies, an assassination attempt, and a satire on American patriotism.
After a break of more than a decade, Klimowski was commissioned by one of Poland’s independent publishers to design another series of authorial posters, this time for the films by Jim Jarmusch (Permanent Vacation, Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, Mystery Train and Night on Earth). The typography and the heterogeneous formal structure is what distinguishes this series of poster from their stylistically varied predecessors.  Nevertheless the particular use of collage is easily identifiable with the designer. Again, we are dealing with an ascetic approach to collage that makes use of only two or three meaningful ingredients. Let’s look at the poster for “Mystery Train”. It depicts a face with Japanese features that is partly hidden by a mask in the form of a vinyl record, with the word “Sun” on the label (Elvis Presley’s first recording studio). A vintage railway train runs across the bottom of the composition. The film tells the story of a Japanese teenage couple making a pilgrimage to the Mecca of rock ‘n roll. Again we can see how a few “ready made” elements can be combined to make a strong graphic statement capturing the film’s essential narrative theme.
The same method and approach can be detected in Klimowski’s book covers, designed after the artist returned to London from Warsaw. John McConnell, then the art director of the publishers Faber&Faber, came upon the idea of pairing writers with graphic artists. Klimowski created covers for Mario Vargas Llosa, Rachel Ingalls, Kazuo Ishiguro, Harold Pinter, Milan Kundera as well as many other novelists and playwrights. Harold Pinter and Milan Kundera were so pleased by the designs that they insisted on a continued collaboration with the illustrator. Klimowski’s designs for a series of books popularising philosophy should also be mentioned – in the small volumes on Kant and Walter Benjamin, each spread is in itself an autonomous piece of graphic design.

Unfortunately many of these adventurous projects have had a limited life span. “Fashions change, as do art directors”, observed Klimowski with detached stoicism. With this, he focused his attention on his own work, work that came from an inner need as opposed to a commission. This self-motivated work brought with it a return to crafting pictures manually, using ink, gouache and the linocut. (It’s worth noting that Klimowski originally studied sculpture and painting at Saint Martins School of Art & Design in London, before specializing in poster design and film animation at the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw). Gradually individual artworks evolved into graphic novels, initially without words, and later incorporating text with the images.
It appears that the graphic novel is now Klimowski’s principal preoccupation. Stylistically, his books are austere and minimalist in form. The contrasty black and white images are even more ascetic than the collages, (even though collages appear in his second novel, “The Secret”). The author makes use of an economy of means, enriched by resorting to allusion, ambiguity and mysteriousness. Readers (not viewers, because each illustration is read, like a pictogram or Hieroglyph) have to fill the gaps in the narrative with their own imagination. Klimowski points out that  “images are more ambiguous than words”. Deceptively, his stories have a beginning, middle and end. They make one think of films, each illustration resembling a frozen frame, as if the camera shutter opens sporadically every other second or so. Yet the storyline remains elusive, inviting the reader to dream his own film, running parallel to the author’s film.
After creating two wordless novels (“The Depository: A Dream Book” in 1994 and “The Secret” in 2002), Klimowski authored a book combining images with text. “Horace Dorlan” is no ordinary illustrated book. The events described in the narrative require the text be superseded by a series of images, only to return back to words. Scenes that are initially described in the text later find their reflections in pictures and vice versa. The inter-relationship of text and images grows in its complexity; one cannot exist without the other. It becomes apparent that pictures, like dreams, retain their own secret meanings.
More “conventional” comic books are also part of Klimowski’s artistic output. In collaboration with his wife, the artist Danusia Schejbal, he has adapted and illustrated classic works such as “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov, “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson and two short stories by Stanislaw Lem entitled  “Robot…”. With every work he makes, he remains one of today’s greatest poets of imagery on the border of consciousness and dream. Quite rightly he is associated with Franz Kafka, Jean Cocteau, and the surrealists. One could also add Alfred Kubin, Bruno Schulz, Walerian Borowczyk and even Chris Marker of “La Jetee”. Klimowski belongs to the club of a chosen few, to those who see and feel more.