Tomasz Kawiak, Untitled from the series "Painting Leaving Traces Around the Axis", 1973

The artist, uncompromising, our "export product", gained enormous fame in France, just after Igor Mitoraj and Magdalena Abakanowicz, then in the world.

Sculptor, performer, painter, draughtsman, a man with an extraordinary sense of the world art market. He left the country not seeing the possibility of realizing his creative path here, and thanks to this he has been walking the roads of world art for more than 40 years.

As is usually the case, he is now also appreciated in Poland, in his native city, which he left in distaste, stands at the corner of Okopowa Street and Narutowicza Street a fountain with blue jeans - his main compositional motif. It was here that years ago Tomek Kawiak's "Pain" took place - the first ecological happening in Lublin (and perhaps the first in Poland) - in the early hours of the morning Tomek Kawiak, in a gesture of protest, bandaged senselessly (in his opinion ) mutilated tree crowns, a few days earlier "brutally" cut down by workers from the Municipal Greening Company. Let's remember it was 1970... For this gesture at a time when ecology was a word used by almost no one, he was already uniting with the world's problem. For this we love him. We, too, weep for every tree and deplore the ubiquitous concretization, the mutilation of tree crowns.

For some time now we have also had the opportunity to get to know him as a man of the pen, the author of several interesting books that catch the eye with unconventional narration.

He learned from the masters and from them drew handfuls of knowledge of world trends in art. In the early 1970s, Tomek Kawiak, a fresh graduate of the Faculty of Architecture and Ceramics at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, as part of an idea he called "exchange art" (troc-art), distributed plastic "baguettes" containing secretions from his own body to passersby on the streets of Paris. And although it was an idea and art forms taken from the tradition of art of the 1960s, especially the French variety of pop art, New Realism- the action was a huge success.

Tom, who at the time was apprenticing with the leading representative of New Realism, Cesar, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1976, he began a worldwide action of so-called brickwork, which continues to this day, and leaves special bricks in various places he visits.