b. 1957 Painter, performer, poet, art theorist, and educator. He studied at the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1980–1985), graduating from the studio of Professor Rajmund Ziemski. Since 1986, he has taught at the Faculty of Industrial Design at his alma mater. From 1982 to 1992, he was a member of the Gruppa collective, with which he exhibited and took part in actions. Co-founder and publisher of the magazine “Oj dobrze już”. A turning point in Włodzimierz Pawlak’s work came with the Didactic Boards series (1987–1988), in which he radically altered his formal language. These paintings resemble negatives of scratched-up school blackboards – their surfaces filled with graphic grids of ideograms, maps, diagrams, and symbols referencing repositories of knowledge and culture. These conceptual compositions transform painting into a tool for analyzing collective memory and educational mechanisms. Immediately following this series, Pawlak began working on his Diaries (from 1989 to the present) – abstract, formally consistent paintings that serve as records of time. In 1990, he received the Grand Prix at the painting festival in Cagnes-sur-Mer. Recipient of the Jan Cybis Award (2017).