Art for Everyone – an interview with Patryk Różycki

‘Klaps’ Newspaper Published on 22.09.2026

FOT. NATALIA KANIAK

– In the world of contemporary art, there is a specific, pre-established code that artists follow; I speak a different language and, in doing so, I challenge the status quo. Because of this, I still feel like an outsider who constantly has to prove something,’ says Patryk Różycki, a visual artist and painter whose life and work form the basis of Łukasz Ronduda’s film Tell Me What You Feel.

Mateusz Demski

Mateusz Demski: Tell me, where are you from?

Patryk Różycki: I was born in the small town Koło, a place known for its production of toilets. I like to talk about it – it’s a bit of local pride. It always amazed me when I was abroad and saw that logo in a toilet. Once, in Lviv, I took out my camera and started filming to show my parents that our ‘Koło’ is everywhere.

I come from a family that experienced both social advancement and social decline. Shortly afterwards, when I was six, we moved to the countryside. At first, I didn’t understand it at all. After all, everything was fine; we used to visit our family in Lower Silesia every weekend. We lived in a block of flats, and my parents were planning to buy a house. Suddenly, my sister died, my father fell ill, went on disability benefit, and we started running out of money. He was the chairman of the trade union at KORUND, a factory that produced abrasive discs and products.

Do you remember anything from that time?

Mainly sadness and tension between my parents. My mum was forced to leave her wedding rings at the pawnbroker’s. I wondered why she had to sell something that was important to her.

It was only when we moved to the countryside that it began to dawn on me what had happened. At the new school, there was a division into classes based on background. The children who lived closest to the primary school – that is, in the local parish – went to Class A; they were a bit better dressed and kept themselves apart from the rest. I ended up in the class with children from farming families, even though my parents had never worked on the land. My father was an intellectual; even after we’d moved to the countryside, he never stopped wearing a suit.

Were you already drawing or painting back then?

No, I’ve never been interested in art, because I didn’t have access to it. My father used to do all my school drawings for me, whilst I was busy playing football.

I imagine there wasn’t a community centre or a cinema in the area.

Our access to culture was much the same as that of most people living outside the big cities. It mainly came to me through the telly, the TV series we used to watch as a family. I’ve always associated culture with something you experience together. I remember watching Rocky over and over again. Łukasz’s film is a bit like that story. Admittedly, his protagonist doesn’t get the chance to fight for the world title, but he does grapple with reality.

How did it come about that you eventually took up art?

Towards the end of lower secondary school, a teacher wrote the schools’ websites on the blackboard, and among them was the Art School in Koło. I didn’t have a computer back then, so I had no way of checking it out. I wanted to be a sports journalist, but I wasn’t doing very well at school, so I wasn’t thinking about going to sixth form. I told my dad that I wanted to go to the art school. We went for an interview; my friends’ mum gave me a book called ‘Sztuka i czas’ (art and time), and I started copying famous works onto A4 sheets of paper. I drew a black square on a white background. The lady who interviewed me was very surprised by this.

Your paintings are a far cry from Malevich’s.

High school gave me a passion for art, but a key moment came in my second year, when I fell hopelessly in love. My parents made sure my passion grew; they bought me various art books about artists. In one of them, I saw a painting by Van Gogh in which he had depicted a woman leaning on her knees and titled it ‘Sorrow’. That’s when I realised I didn’t want to paint still lifes – those apples I’d never eaten and which had no connection to me whatsoever.

And you started painting yourself.

I was devastated by that unhappy love affair. I blamed myself for being ugly and unattractive. I would sit in front of the mirror all day and began to paint my nudes in black ink. In this way, I tried to come to terms with the body I loathed. It helped me to accept it.

Your paintings often depict scenes from your family life. When did you involve your loved ones in this process?

I’ve been doing this from the very beginning; my family were my closest models. When I discovered Lucian Freud’s work in Year 4, I thought I’d like to work in a similar way. My father set up a barn for me; that’s where I had my studio. And I started painting them. Mum was almost naked, my sister was lying on the floor. Every time I painted something, I’d go and show it to them. They’d comment on it; they usually liked it. That’s when I realised that if they understood it, then this was the sort of art I needed to be creating. At university, I began to think more about what a painting should convey, and what purpose my art should serve at all.

And you painted scenes like these: ‘The house my parents were going to buy before my sister died, seen through the window from the back seat of a Polonez Caro’, ‘My sister Oliwia taking her CV to a shop in Konin’, ‘The moment my brother Roland died in a staff changing room’.

I also painted the moment when my parents took out a loan to pay for my studies. That was important to me because I felt they had to go into debt so that I could get through my education and, in the future, move up the social ladder. I painted the stories that shaped my father – such as the abuse he suffered at the hands of his own father. Or the moment when Grandad Antoni took Dad out into the fields, showed him the people working there and said: ‘See, this is what hard work looks like. Can you smell the manure? It’s better to study and work lightly, isn’t it?’

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Why did you want to tell these stories?

I thought that if I didn’t tell their stories, no one else would. That their lives would disappear. They would leave no trace behind. Because my parents and people like them don’t have that privilege. I wanted to give them the chance to be seen.

When I began to engage more actively with culture, I realised that there was nothing there that depicted the life of a family like ours, that I had nothing to identify with. At the same time, the emotion of shame was significant to me. I came to the conclusion that, since I was ashamed of something, perhaps it would be worth telling others about it, in order to overcome that feeling.

What exactly were you embarrassed about?

All sorts of things. I was often made to feel ashamed by people. When I was at sports school, I’d hear: ‘He’s from the countryside!’. The way it works is that when you’re ashamed, you don’t want to be caught out, you don’t want anyone to expose you. That’s why I exposed myself – to get rid of the fear, but also to deprive other people of that weapon. I simply voiced that shame out loud. I was on a date with a girl and I told her that I was ashamed of how I looked, how I was dressed, and that I couldn’t afford certain things.

So your art is all about shaming people.

Many people who come across my paintings write to me saying that they’ve felt ashamed all their lives and have suddenly realised that it’s okay not to feel ashamed. After one of my exhibitions, a mother rang me and said that she had always been ashamed of her life, but now she could see how much it helps other people when she talks about it. She began to see the value in that experience; at last, she was able to share it with someone.

Does art help you overcome your insecurities?

Many people tell me that I practise therapeutic art, assuming that I must surely be healing myself through painting. I also hear people say that art can help you overcome a crisis. It is not possible to work through your problems in this way, and that is not what I am doing here. I prefer to talk about the effectiveness of therapy, although this is, of course, a tool that is inaccessible to most of the public. Therapy offers the best way to understand oneself and one’s life, and helps to express repressed emotions. But I believe that my paintings can be like a Trojan horse, capable of entering the viewer’s mind and telling them: ‘Tell others what you feel.’

However, this is not typical practice. It is not without reason that art is still associated with something inaccessible, far removed from the experience of many people.

Because for many centuries, art served the upper classes in legitimising their position. Even those who rose through the ranks and were admitted into this sphere wanted to be accepted, so they conformed to the dominant aesthetic. Art did not take other narratives into account. There was no place for them. Of course, I too want to feel accepted by the art world; it matters a great deal to me. At the same time, I find it hard to take criticism when someone tells me that my paintings are too literal and therefore aren’t art.

In Tell Me What You Feel, there is a scene in which the protagonist talks to his curator; he explains that he would like to create art that his parents, who live in the countryside, and people like them could understand, and in response he hears: ‘People like that don’t go to galleries; they don’t understand what art is.’

In the world of contemporary art, there is a specific, pre-established code that artists follow; I speak a different language and, in doing so, I challenge the status quo. Because of this, I still feel like an outsider who constantly has to prove something, who has to make a case for themselves, even though I’ve gained recognition and there have been many major exhibitions of my work. It seems to me that this is a feeling typical of people who have experienced social mobility and must constantly grapple with imposter syndrome.

Some people would expect my art to be more mysterious, to require more intellectual effort. This is because the audience for art consists mainly of people with a high level of cultural capital. My parents aren’t interested in art because they have neither the space nor the time for it. If your daily life involves wondering how to make ends meet and how to cook a meal from whatever you have, the last thing you’ll be doing is carefree appreciation of a work of art.

So who is art meant for?

For everyone. Let there be abstraction, figuration, surrealism, critical art. Everything has its place. The only thing missing is the question: who is a particular exhibition aimed at? What if people turn up who are unable to situate all these works within a specific moment in art history? If that happens, it will be nothing but a farce and a waste of time for them.
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Sometimes similar thoughts cross my mind when it comes to Polish cinema. I get the impression that our filmmakers don’t ask themselves why they make films or for whom.

I would ask a different question: do these people even have access to what the majority of society lives on? Even looking at our politicians, we are talking about an elite that is losing touch with the real world, that does not know how people live and does not even want to understand it. Over fifteen million Poles live below the subsistence level. Nearly two million live in extreme poverty. We do not talk at all about the fact that, after 1989, the working class in Poland was betrayed. Those who succeeded built companies, made their fortunes and decided that the manual labourers should aspire to their standard of living.

What’s interesting about all this is the word ‘aspire’.

Exactly – what does that actually mean? Do we really want to create heroes whom people ‘want to aspire to’? Who are successful? This is how art and cinema are produced that merely polarise opinion, in which the inhabitants of villages and small towns are demonised. Sometimes I get questions from journalists: ‘Do people really still have to take out payday loans, pawn their wedding rings, or not even have a bathroom?’ The people around us are living in a complete bubble.

Do you think your art transcends this division?

I believe so. The contemporary art scene maintains that art cannot be for everyone, that it must possess specific qualities which set it apart from the rest of society. I disagree with this, which is why I’m so keen to break into the mainstream. Łukasz’s film gives me access to new audiences. I’m receiving messages from people all over Poland encouraging me to hold an exhibition in their town. Suddenly, it turns out that art gives people a sense of identity.

So what’s it like to become the star of a film?

To be honest with you, I’d secretly been dreaming about it. Not to become a screen star, but to gain visibility and make my way into the public imagination. The most important thing – though stemming from the harsh reality of life for many people in this country – was simply a desire to feel valued. That was my way of trying to feel better about myself. When I watched Rocky as a child, I saw a second-rate boxer from Philadelphia who suddenly became somebody.

Patryk Różycki – visual artist, painter and performer. A graduate of the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied painting and intermedia. A two-time finalist in the Polityka ‘Passports’ awards (2023 and 2025). His works have been exhibited at leading institutions across Poland. He lives and works in Warsaw.