The Amazing Worlds of The Artist Jacek Yerka

Jacek Yerka – pseudonym of Jacek Kowalski – in the early works of the author you can see the letter “K”, Jacek Yerka instead of the signature “YERKA” in later works.

Jacek was born in Northern Poland in 1952. The future artist grew up surrounded by medieval architecture, miraculously escaped from bombing during the Second World War. The neighborhood of the house and the kitchen of the grandmother, where the young Jacek spent a lot of time, had a huge impact on the artist’s work.

“It seems to me that the 50s were a sort of Golden Age, these are the happy years of my childhood, filled with the magic of the world around me, in my works it’s reflected in buildings, furniture and various prewar trinkets.If I needed to draw a computer, I would certainly attach the pre-war Aesthetics and to it “- says Jacek Yerka.

His first picture, according to the artist, he wrote before entering college. Jacek Yerka studied graphics at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Nicolaus Copernicus in the city of Toruń. His teachers some time tried to teach him to draw in a more modern abstract, less detailed manner, but the artist saw in this desire of teachers an attempt to strangle his own style. Over time, the teachers of Yerka left these attempts, seeing the pupil’s unusual talent.

Jacek Yerka’s style of criticism is attributed to realistic surrealism and the style of fantasy. The carefully traced paintings of Jacek Yerka are filled with the echo of the famous surrealists of the past, from Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Brueghel to Salvador Dali and René Magritte.

American science fiction writer Harlan Ellison – Harlan Ellison was so impressed with Yerka’s work that he wrote 13 new short stories for “Mind Fields”, the first book published in 1994 by Yerka. Each story relates to one of the thirty Mind Fields paintings of this remarkable Polish artist. In 1999, another book by Jacek Yerka, “The Fantastic Art of Jacek Yerka,” a portfolio of 21 works by the artist, was published.

In 1995, Jacek Yerka received the prestigious “World Fantasy Award” as the best artist.

The works of Jacek Yerka are exhibited in Poland, Germany, France, Monaco and the United States, as well as in a number of collections around the world.