Marek Tobolewski

For nearly 40 years Tobolewski has created non-representational work across a wide range of scales. Drawing underpins his practice, symmetrical structures contain central voids, that wrestle with the impossibility of controlling a free-flowing line that seek a stillness. All Tobolewski’s work is freehand; rigour is required. He says … “I don’t use masking, either in tape or fluid; and so, there is jeopardy throughout the journey of making. Boundaries are set and pushed to breaking point.”

Tobolewski often refers to older works to inform and inspire a fresh approach to his new work. “I refer to the linage of my own practice and use an established process to find it but where it is going remains unknowable.”

The youngest of six to Polish Parents. His father was a sergeant in the Free Polish Army in WWII and demobilised in Italy, where he met and married his mother in 1947. She had escaped and walked with five other young women, from a labour-farm in the Southeast of Germany over the Alps into Italy. In 1949 The Polish Re-settlement Act, helped them emigrate to Kelvedon, Essex Displacement Camp. After eleven years living in a Nissen Hut, they were relocated to Harlow New Town. “There, I lived a safer, more settled life, which gave me the freedom to become an artist and an art lecturer.”

Tobolewski now lives with his family in Nottingham and is a resident artist at PRIMARY.