Andrzej Wieteszka – visual artist, graphic designer, painter and illustrator.
Andrzej specialises in posters, murals, graphic design and illustration. He has participated in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in Poland and abroad. As a poster artist, he regularly participates in international biennials, thematic reviews and individual exhibitions.
Recently, his works have been displayed at exhibitions such as: Masters of Polish Posters in Seoul (2024), International Poster Biennale in Warsaw (2023), PLASTIC (Seoul, 2024), Type Text (2024) and at an exhibition of Polish posters in Bardejov. In 2024, he presented a solo exhibition of paintings and graphics entitled Jutro Będzie Futro (Tomorrow There Will Be Fur) during the Widoki festival.
He has collaborated with many cultural institutions, including the Grand Theatre – National Opera, for which he created original portraits of composers, posters and illustrative publications; the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, designing large-format street murals (March ’68, Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and others); and the Baj Theatre.
He is the author of large-format murals in public spaces in many Polish cities, as well as in corporate interiors, including for BNP Paribas, Salad Story, Pasaż Wiecha, WIT Academy, MTV Music and others.
As a press illustrator, he has collaborated with editorial offices from around the world, such as Newsweek, Variety, Fricote, Der Spiegel, Maxim, Gazeta Wyborcza, The Guardian and others.
He has been the art director of many magazines and the author of their layouts, including Cosmopolitan, A4, and ELLE Deco. He has also worked as an art director and video clip director for the Polish editorial office of Fashion TV Paris. He has created animated programme graphics for MTV and Comedy Central.
He is an academic lecturer at the WIT Academy, where he taught illustration and large-format graphics. He lives and works in Warsaw.
> instagram.com/andrzej_wieteszka/
> wieteszka.myportfolio.com
About Andrzej Wieteszka’s conference icon: a counter-logo of flickering visions
Optic polarisation is a process that sharpens the view, seducing the viewer to see things in a specific way and through a filter, because light particles are curated and re-organised through a grid-structure. When we carry polarised sunglasses, we feel that we see things more clearly, just like when we watch series on screens based on the latest polarization technology. But we see clearly, because we filter out and un-see certain things. We sacrifice blurriness and ambiguity, and decide to normalize a filtered vision of the world.
First inspired by the mascots of our city of Poznań, two goats butting heads, Andrzej Wieteszka created an image that can no longer be reduced to those early inspirations, claims no one true meaning, and encourages the viewer to open their eyes and search for the flicker of ambiguities. A moth, a butterfly, a mask, a bird, two people, what else do you find in the image? One could say it de-polarises the once known image in order to host multiplicity and to invite individual readings – like, in different grades, a tarot card, or an inkblot in a Rorschach test.
Andrzej Wieteszka’s logo for EASA2026 reminds of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit (2009: 433), an icon that challenges the habit (and longing) of our brains to settle on one meaning in what we see and judge. It recalls the constant flickering and simultaneousness and coincidence of double visions, a notion social anthropologists also know from Anna Tsing’s work. “Double vision gives us a headache, reminding us of our frailty,” she notes. Tsing reminds us that following the enlightenment “’[e]xperts’ are those who have trained themselves to see with a singular vision.” Questioning the worth of knowledge based on such singular vision, Tsing advocates for “paying more rather than less attention to the multiplicity of knowledge claims. Both global knowledge and knowledge that travels around the globe are improved by dialogue across difference” (Tsing 2005: 81).
Our conference icon casts doubts, raises questions, and reveals itself anew every time we let our eyes wander across it. Wieteszka’s proposition is self-conscious and critical about its own purpose of branding something, and swiftly subverts it with what is at hand, asserting itself as an counter-logo that raises questions rather than providing answers, challenges identities rather than affirming them, and plays the jester for us at EASA2026 in Poznań.
Tsing, A. L. (2011). Friction: an ethnography of global connection. (STU-Student edition, pp. xiv–xiv). Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400830596
Wittgenstein, L., Hacker, P. M. S., & Schulte, J. (2009). Philosophical Investigations. John Wiley & Sons. http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=514408
