Roman Klonek

Roman Klonek, born in 1969 in Katowice, Poland, grew up in Hanover before studying visual communication and printmaking in Düsseldorf from 1993 to 1999, topped up by a woodcut scholarship in Trier. He works mainly in multicolour woodcut using the lost-cut technique, where the block survives a single pass, producing around twenty motifs a year in small hand-printed editions. His world is populated by odd creatures and metamorphoses between humans and animals, in a pop-surreal register punctuated with Cyrillic and Asian characters. He cites Polish, Russian and Czech animated films of the 1970s, American cartoons and manga as influences. He lives in Düsseldorf and teaches at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen.