RAFAL OLBINSKI

Rafal Olbinski was born in Kielce, Poland in 1945 and trained as an architect, earning his degree from the Architectural Department of Warsaw Politechnical School before turning his full attention to painting and design.

He relocated to the United States in 1982 and quickly built a reputation as a leading painter, illustrator, and designer. By 1985, he had joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he began sharing his vision with the next generation of artists.

His career has earned him more than 150 awards. Among the most notable are Gold and Silver Medals from the Society of Illustrators in both New York and Los Angeles, the Big Crit 2000 award from Critique Magazine in San Francisco, and the Prix Savignac — the International Oscar for the World’s Most Memorable Poster — presented in Paris in 1994. That same year, the President of Poland honored him with the Gloria Artis gold medal, the country’s highest distinction in the arts, and London’s Creative Review recognized him for Best of British Illustration.

In 1995, a jury chaired by Mayor Rudolf Giuliani selected his design as New York City’s official Capital of the World Poster. The following year, he took home the Steven Dohanos Award for best painting at the Society of Illustrators’ Annual Member Exhibition. In 2002, the Italian city of Fondi presented him with the Divina Giulia award in recognition of his contributions to contemporary art.

His relationship with public institutions and civic causes runs deep. The U.S. Information Agency commissioned him in 1996 to design a poster for the 25th anniversary of Earth Day, and called on him again in 2004 for the Earth Day NY poster. From 2002 through 2010, his paintings appeared alongside works by Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol in the Grand Space projection at Grand Central Terminal, a centerpiece of New York’s Earth Day celebrations.

On the international stage, a solo retrospective titled Art at the Turn of the Century opened at Berlin’s Willy-Brandt House in 2001. His stage design debut came the following year, when his sets for the Opera Company of Philadelphia’s production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni drew praise from critics at both the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Times observed that if you don’t know his name, “Odds are you know his paintings.” That same year, the Goethe Institute in Hamburg mounted an exhibition of his paintings and posters under the title Art with Moral Purpose.

Olbinski is perhaps best known internationally for his opera house posters and his prolific magazine cover work — contributing to publications from Time and Newsweek to The New Yorker. He has designed more than 100 album covers for Allegro Music’s Opera D’Oro Series, and created a series of paintings on moral themes published across seven consecutive issues of the German magazine Stern, which later toured as a traveling exhibition launched under the patronage of Eva Luise Köhler, wife of Germany’s president.

In 2008, Hewlett Packard featured him in a solo exhibition — Olbinski: Photokina Expo — in Cologne, Germany. The following year, the Jule Collins Smith Museum presented New Dreams of Old Values, a major museum exhibition of his work. He has also completed numerous large-scale public murals across Europe, including three unveiled in Poland in spring 2007. His reach extends further still: he juried the 2006 International Film Festival in Bangkok and was selected in 2011 to design the ceremonial curtain for a significant new opera house under construction in Poland.

Olbinski’s paintings resist the literal. Rather than depicting the observable world, they chart the inner landscape of the mind — richly layered with psychological complexity and poetic suggestion. In this, he follows a surrealist lineage that runs through Dalí and Magritte, rendering the mind as a stage where dreams perform and meaning hides in plain sight.

“I believe that every artist falls in love with his work,” Olbinski says, “especially when you paint women.” Goya and Botticelli inform his technical mastery, particularly in his celebrated depictions of women — at once classical in form and charged with ambiguity. His nudes are elegant and elusive, figures who seem both to invite and to withhold. That tension surfaced publicly in 2006, when his image of a bare-breasted mermaid, created for Poland’s Miss World competition, sparked official objection. Olbinski responded by adding a scarf — a small concession that did little to diminish the work’s provocative grace.

André Parinaud, President of the International Arts Salon in Paris, has written that poetic humor is a quality rarely found in the fine arts, and that Olbinski possesses it as a natural gift. “He wants to show us that our imagination is a magical world, which we are recreating forever,” Parinaud writes. “He draws us into a different universe, and forces us to use our eyes to participate in a marvelous world which is the true dimension of dreams.”