From the woods to the blocks

Roman Klonek's family came to West Germany from the Polish part of Upper Silesia in the 1970s; he himself grew up in Hanover. From 1993 to 1999 he studied Visual Communication with a focus on printmaking at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, complemented by a scholarship for woodcut printing at the Trier Academy of Fine Arts. While still a student, he co-founded the artist group "Tapezisten" and the graphic fanzine "Herrensahne" together with Tobi Dahmen and Leo Leowald.Klonek is today one of the internationally recognized figures of contemporary printmaking in Germany. His works are multi-colored woodcuts, printed using the "reduction print" method: the printing block is cut further after each color and can only ever be used once — which is why each edition is limited to just a handful of prints, usually no more than ten. Around twenty new motifs are created this way each year, every one printed by hand.In his pictorial worlds, whimsical creatures and human-animal metamorphoses meet in a pop- surreal, often absurd-seeming setting.Typographic elements drawn from Cyrillic and Asian characters set striking accents. Klonek pulls off a deft balancing act between propaganda aesthetics, folklore and pop — fed by Polish, Russian and Czech animated films of the 1970s as much as by role models such as Frank Kozik, Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami, Raymond Pettibon, Gary Baseman and Zdeněk Miler.From 2001 to 2008, Klonek co-organized the Düsseldorf "Galerie Revolver"; he has also appeared several times at the character design festival "Pictoplasma" and regularly teaches woodcut workshops at graphic arts colleges. His commissioned drawings have appeared in WIRED, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. His work is exhibited in Germany and increasingly internationally, most recently in Oslo, London and São Paulo. Roman Klonek lives and works in Düsseldorf.