Premio Combat Prize

Born in 1974, Pawel Kordaczka comes from Ustrzyki Dolne, a small picturesque town situated in the Bieszczady Mountains in the south east of Poland.
He started his artistic journey at the Art College in Jaroslaw which was followed by a degree in painting from the University of Silesia Art Institute in Katowice and a year of lectureship in the Fine Arts Department there. He is affiliated to the Przemysl Fine Arts Society in Poland and the Association of Polish Artists in Great Britain. He is currently living and working in London. He was among the winners of the 2001 German Paderborn Volksbank Young European Artist award. In 2008 he received an award from the Polish weekly New Time.
My main means of expression are oil painting and pencil drawing, while both the composition and the content are influenced by the ancient art of the Orthodox icon. I have aimed for many years to capture and to preserve that particular brand of spirituality, while veering more and more towards the abstract. My sacral series of paintings had its beginnings in the landscape of my native Bieszczady and the tiny Orthodox churches dotted all around it. Slowly but surely, I stepped inside those unprepossessing temples looking up towards the icon itself; the image at the very heart of the Orthodox tradition. Notwithstanding the fact that over the years my paintings have got deeper and deeper into the realm of abstraction and have moved from the sacred towards the mundane, a small grain of the original inspiration remains.