Wojciech Giza born in 1952 in Nowa Sol where he also graduated from Technical School of Casting.
He then moved to Cracow beginning his studies at the Mining-Metallurgic Academy, and a year later at the Academy of Fine Arts.
During his studies the St. John's Apocalypse made an enormous impression on his personality when, and the same time, joined fascinations with religious myths of ancient civilizations. This allowed him to create his own original style defined by art critics as "fantastic improvisations" or "magical painting of history".
In 1975, at the threshold of his artistic career appears professor Karol Estreiher from Colegium Maius of Jagellonian University in Cracow, distinguished historian and an art expert, whose wonderful art reviews of his works open the way to acknowledged gallerias and prestigious exhibit halls.
Shortly after he also receives recommendations to Association of Polish Artists from prominent graphic, Jerzy Panek and a professor of painting faculty of Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, Antoni Siwecki.
For the next few years he is associated with the Fellowship of Friends of Fine Arts in Cracow, fulfilling a function of a permanent member of an Audit Committee.
Mr. Giza showed his work at many individual and collective exhibitions, in the country, as well as abroad. He painted more then 2000 paintings and miniatures, applying acrylic and tempera technique on canvas, paper, and wooden board.
In the year 1991 setting out abroad Canada yet again with exhibition of his work, after a few months of stay in Toronto, he moves to New York, where he settles permanently.
...being born in expanses of the night of the mystic, solitude of eremites...
Creative output of Wojciech Giza was being born in expanses of the night of the mystic, solitude of eremites, and bold poetical dreams of the magi with the power of secret knowledge of a demiurge.
Giza creates through the barriers of the ages, in the "Union of the Initiated" in arcane of intangible world, availing himself of magical-esoteric massages and symbols, harnessed from traditions of Far and Near East...
Pictorial visions of Wojciech Giza reside with it's roots in mirages of Heronim Bosch with it's entire mystical and alchemical baggage. Charged with esoteric significance, with imagery and symbolic requiring the knowledge of Great and Small Arcana according to the books of the learned, and a mystery of St. John's Apocalypse in particular, are a coded message, which can study, such as old incunabulas hidden in Cracow's libraries.
In the painting, "Emigrants", Giza beckons the visions of Bosch's hell. New York clearly fascinates the painter and fills him with cosmic fear. Pathos and indigence of Polish existence manifests itself with particular force. Bosch filled his paintings with monsters of deformed and grotesque nature. Giza ventures with his horrid representations to elements of modern technology, to rounded and cylindrical forms, to pipes and cables as though complicated parts of machines and computer gadgets.
In paintings he generally maintains characteristic monochromy a cold green-blue range of colors in parts of his paintings, bestowing upon them metaphysical dimension, as Bergman's films almost, and like in "The Serpents' Egg", chilly glimmer has do here with the presence of evil.
We do not often see paintings saturated with the desire to represent the unknown, to tend to grasp the unity of the past and the present. Such are the paintings of Wojciech Giza. His art demonstrates his unique reality, completely different from that seen every day, a reality born of a dream of one stable and immutable order which for centuries has ruled the world. This half-mystical idea is rooted in a belief in a secret the wisdom, an multitude of forms. There is no room here for coincidence. Everything has its designated place in time and space.
Giza's paintings are such that they lead us into the reality of myth in which time dissolves into infinity while returning in a circle to the point of origin. Giza invokes many cultures. In his paintings we sense motifs drawn from different artistic traditions: Aztec reliefs, sculptures from India, the stylized geometry of African masks, and the oval forms of Fernand Leger. Above all hovers the spirit
Heronymus Bosch and the gloomy phantasmagoric atmosphere of his works. Giza does not however imitate anyone. His work merely suggests a wealth of inspirations while indicating the goal towards which the artist strives.
Giza's paintings are such that they lead us into the reality of myth in which time dissolves into infinity while returning in a circle to the point of origin.
Deeply convinced of the of the spiritual unity of all cultures, Giza tries in his work to create their synthesis, to show all their common elements. His is a homogeneous but not univocal art. On the contrary, the works are full of mystery and understatement. The climate is close to Romanesque sculpture which endeavored to represent the whole of the contemporary world, both the known and imagined.
Giza's paintings astonish with the richness of forms, integrating apparently incongruous characteristics. These are as much biological as mechanical, as much natural as visionary. The originality of this art is intensified by Giza's use of color. He uses his own unique palette which sets off the autonomous reality of his paintings. They are generally in one tonality, around which the artist achieves a singularly intense richness which blends all into a homogeneous unity radiating a strange phosphorescent light. Such coloring intensifies the impression of the "otherworldliness". In order to discover it, however, we have to reach beyond the dimension of the everyday. This is what Giza's art communicates. It is impossible to pass by it indifferently because it forces reflection on the fundamental questions, which we usually forget or do not want remember.
Wojciech Giza is an amazingly creative painter and poet. However, on viewing his work, which continues to attain ever greater heights of fantasy, one must add that he is one that brotherhood of painters surely charged by a cosmic energy, from which springs his talent and artistic mission on our planet, indeed, he himself and assuredly accompany Giza the painter, the architect and the astral engineer, as he creates an unusual universe of cosmic empires in images of large and miniature format.
...he creates an unusual universe of cosmic empires...
In viewing Giza's paintings, almost with bated breath we experience revelations through the choice of the astonishing juxtaposition of colors, the precision of the technical execution and above all, the inexhaustible inventiveness. Giza does not follow the color artistic treatments that have been used previously in the art of painting. He is his own master in discovering unexpected arrangements of colors. His amalgams of greens, blues, reds, violets and yellows produce a resulting richness of hues that are simply dazzling.