Andrzej Klimowski – författare

By the end of this wordless novel, when the artist wakes and ends the nightmare, readers have experienced a visual thriller with political overtones.

This is another disturbing novel without words by the Polish artist-illustrator of The Depository. The narrative is rendered entirely as a sequence of 300 pages of compelling drawings and photo-montages. The Secret projects an unsettling story about a young woman and her two children who vanish from their apartment one evening, leaving a distraught husband to follow a trail of sinister signs and traces left by their abductors. There is something alarming and almost occult in the forces at work in the background, and a turning point in the mystery is a giant camera obscura which ultimately envelops everything. The Secret, in its metamorphosis of daily reality into a dark and frightening dream world, leaves a stream of surreal images and ideas in the visual memory and the mind.

Walter Benjamin is often considered the key modern philosopher and critic of modern art.Tracing his influence on modern aesthetics and cultural history, Introducing Walter Benjamin highlights his commitment to political transformation of the arts as a means to bring about social change.Benjamin witnessed first-hand many of the cataclysmic events of modern European history. He took a critical stance on the dominant ideologies of Marxism, Zionism and Technocracy, and his attempt to flee Nazi Europe ultimately led to his suicide in 1940.With its brilliant combination of words and images, this is an ideal introduction to one of the most elusive philosophers.

Drawing is perhaps the most immediate medium through which an idea can be articulated. Illustration takes drawing into the narrative realm. The illustrations that we see as children stay with us forever; they play a seminal role in the development of our imagination.On Illustration argues that this unassuming artistic discipline can enrich a person's experience of cultural life provided the illustrator's talent is matched by the courage and intelligence of the client.The book is an insight into Andrzej Klimowski's practice, and will help define the role and status of the illustrator in today's creative industries.

“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.

At the heart of the dream city of Engelstadt stand the tall storeys of an ancient apartment block, home to a nightmare labyrinth of corridors and secrets. Christmas is coming, but the mysterious disappearance of one of its tenants causes a cast of characters (or suspects?) to be assembled before us. An elderly aristocratic widow plays the piano; a young mother disciplines her hallucinating son; a photographer pursues creative experiments under the magnetic spell of the moon. And meanwhile, as a dark cloud threatens to envelop the city, and caped crusaders (or marauders) wander its park, there is a film screening to attend. The eccentric Professor will surely solve the enigma on Christmas Eve… Or will he? A pan-European Pandora’s Box of narrative Russian dolls and Chinese boxes, Edifice builds into an Expressionist graphic vision of our archetypal, metamorphic Shadows. Whether or not “an allegory of some sort” (as one of these characters claims), Andrzej Klimowski’s masterpiece of symbolic form is certainly one of the strangest Christmas stories you will ever read. “If you look carefully, you will see it.”