Janusz Bałdyga (born 1954) – studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in the Department of Painting, where he graduated in 1979 in the studio of Professor Stefan Gierowski. He was a co-founder and member of the creative group Pracownia Dziekanka, also known as Bałdyga-Onuch-Szajna. Together with Jerzy Onuch and Łukasz Szajna, he led the Gallery Pracownia in the Student Artistic Centre “Dziekanka” from 1976 to 1979. Since 1976, he has been a regular collaborator with the Academy of Movement Theatre. He is the author of drawings, objects, installations, performances, and street actions. He has participated in numerous exhibitions, symposia, and artistic manifestations in Poland and abroad, including Galerie Donguy in Paris, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Interdruck Schipper Patitz in Leipzig, BWA Awangarda Gallery in Wrocław, Galeria Labirynt 2 in Lublin, Wschodnia Gallery in Łódź, and many projects in Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, Austria, Russia, Taiwan, Belarus, Switzerland, Israel, Norway, Spain, Japan, Indonesia, Canada, and the USA. Since 2009, he has been running the Performance Art Studio at the Department of Sculpture at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań.
Janusz Bałdyga has developed his own original form of artistic expression, where he consistently reduces language and articulation methods, creatively utilising simple elements to create elementary structures – line, circle, rectangle, and point. Bałdyga uses the concept of “marked places”, where the sense of space and its conditions play a crucial role, as well as the dynamics brought by the human presence. The artist’s body also becomes a constructive element, a tool for describing space, a testimony of the struggle with matter. The constant balancing around a critical point and the attempt to activate the hidden sphere are ongoing themes in his work.