Marek Tobolewski

Over the past four decades Tobolewski has created freehand, non-representational work, across a wide range of scales. Drawing underpins his practice, over the last twenty years, symmetrical structures are prevalent, they contain central voids and wrestle with the impossibility of controlling a free-flowing line, that seeks a stillness.

… “I don’t use masking, either in tape or fluid; and so, there is jeopardy throughout the journey of making. Boundaries are set and then pushed to breaking point … I refer to the linage of my own practice and use an established process to redefine it but where it is going, remains unknowable.”

The youngest of six, to displaced war refuge, Polish parents. His father, a sergeant in the Free Polish Army in WWII was demobilised in Italy, where he met and married his wife in 1947. She had escaped and walked with five other young Polish 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.”

Graduated from Brighton art college in the mid-eighties, Tobolewski relocated and founded Can Studios in the Oldknows building, Nottingham. Where he still lives with his family and is a resident artist at PRIMARY.