"Cover illustration by Andrzej Klimowski" are words familiar to fans of Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro. Recent visitors to the Royal National Theatre will have also had the chance to see some of the most distinctive commercial work of this unique graphic artist on display in the foyer of the Lyttelton Theatre.
Klimowski's book-jacket designs, and theatre and film posters, are instantly recognisable, splicing together images through bold incisions and grafts to create photo-collages that are at once dynamic, iconic and disturbing. The scissors are instruments every bit as important to Klimowski as pencils or brushes, not to mention cameras.
Trained at St Martin's and the Warsaw Academy, he creates illustrations which are are never pretty or ornamental, but jagged, oppositional and fraught with meaning. They draw much from a strong tradition of Polish poster design that includes Henryk Tomaszewski and Andrzej Pagowski.
This month sees the publication of his second novel-without-words by Faber and Faber The Secret. It tells the story of a husband's frantic search for his wife and children who mysteriously vanish from their city apartment late one night. The landscape and logic of The Secret belongs to dream, combining reality and fantasy, threat and possibility, wonder and horror. Mystery and ambiguity are also key elements in a narrative that demands a lot of interpretative effort from the reader. The Secret may be a picture book, but it's no easy read.
Artsworld met up with Klimowski at the Royal College of Art, where he teaches illustration, to find out more.
JD: What is The Secret? Is it a novel? A graphic novel? A dream repository?
AK: 'Dream repository' would be a more accurate description. I'm not really into graphic novels and I don't know much about them. Ideally I'd like to write a novel, but I don't write, I make pictures. I made a little book like this before, The Depository. It really started off, as interesting things do sometimes, when I was out of work. I was working on linocut prints, and whilst making the proofs I hung them on the wall. I could instantly see connections between them, a narrative. So I thought I'd explore these connections and turn them into a story.
JD: Where did you get the inspiration from for The Secret?
AK: I live in a flat on the second floor of a mansion block and I like to observe things that are going on across the road and in the street. That was my setting straight away. I'm also interested in photography and cinema, and I've always thought of photography as a really magical medium. I had the idea of a room being like a camera obscura, which when it registers an image, actually makes the object that is being photographed vanish as a result of being photographed. This feeds into the idea that some people don't like to be photographed because they think that their souls are being invaded. I thought that in this block of flats, it would be interesting if this family vanish as a result of being photographed by these strange people next door.
JD: In The Secret people always seem to be peering into strange worlds through pinholes, keyholes or spyholes. Where do you think this theme originates?
AK: I'm not sure, to tell you the truth. But the whole business of mirrors and other worlds has always interested me. Alice Through The Looking Glass is typical: Alice goes through the looking glass and there's a world which is a different world on the other side. That quite interests me: a world that exists in the periphery of our vision. If you go through the wrong door, that reality takes us to a completely different place.
JD: Angels and devils, mutants and beast-men always seem to find a way into your work. Do you spend a lot of time reading medieval bestiaries?
AK: I do like old engravings and woodcuts, but that's not my main influence. I don't know what it is. I'm interested in insects, and it doesn't surprise me that Luis Bunuel studied entomology. I don't fully know what the connection is, to tell you the truth. There's a poem that always stuck in my mind, Oscar Wilde's The Sphinx, where a man sits in a room brooding. As he sits there in the darkness he begins to see a sphinx in the corner. There's a sexual sort of potency there, and he begins to feel overwhelmed by voluptuousness. The beginning of the poem's very intense; then it drifts off into rhetorical mumbo-jumbo. But towards the end it becomes interesting again because the man is actually mortally afraid of this beast. The thing he was lusting over suddenly becomes an awful threat that he wants to get away from. I'm interested in that kind of overlap, that kind of tension between attraction and repulsion.
JD: The brush and ink linocuts in The Secret are a lot sparser than your poster designs. What turned you towards this style?
AK: My professor in Warsaw, Henryk Tomaszewski - a really good Polish poster designer - always used to say it's good to have a secondary activity next to your main preoccupation. He used to call it professional hygiene. And I think there's something in that, because if you're focused on a way of working, addressing certain issues through a certain medium like posters or book covers, then collage photography can be a useful tool because it allows you to reposition things, to create metaphors and symbols. Now I'm more interested in things that are more ambiguous and leave more to the imagination of the viewer. If I'm doing a poster, I have to convey a certain message; I'm not literal about it, but I do signal a certain meaning. But with the black and white work, everything is left in the shadows, so your imagination has to fill in a lot of gaps. That gives me pleasure, that kind of dialogue with the reader, and that together we're creating a possible narrative.
JD: Why do you think there is such a strong tradition of graphic art and poster design in Poland?
AK: Probably because throughout the 19th century the applied arts in Poland helped keep the national spirit alive. Without the poets and without the painters there'd be no country, there'd be no sense of national identity. It's deeply rooted. Posters always relate to plays, to subject matter, to narrative, which is related again to a sense of national identity. It may be that the kind of reality I'm interested in is a kind of surreal reality or an absurd reality because communism in Poland was so surreal; it was completely mad, nothing made sense. In the west you see surrealism as being fantastic, in Poland it was real; it was a kind of reality.
JD: You were born in Britain, you studied in Poland and you live in London. Do you feel more British than Polish or vice versa?
AK: When the papers over here call me a Polish artist, I think why? I'm just an artist. When I'm in Poland they say, "Ah! Your work is so English!" And of course when I'm England they say, "it's very Eastern European, very Polish". It doesn't really matter to me. I feel very European and I like that.
