Edward Dutkiewicz
Edward Dutkiewicz (April 1, 1961 – December 9, 2007) was a British visual artist known for his use of bright colours and abstract forms, reminiscent of Calder and Matisse. He was born of wartime Polish immigrant parents in Tamworth, Staffordshire on 1 April 1961, and died of complications of Multiple Sclerosis in London on 9 December 2007.
In an obituary of Dutkiewicz, the collector Michael Estorick wrote of "echoes of Alexander Calder and Matisse in his use of bright colour and abstract form", saying further:
Serious illness transforms our view of the world as much as of ourselves. Suffering from Alzheimer's, that fine, unsung painter Bill Utermohlen harrowingly charted his own mental disintegration in a series of spare and haunting self-portraits. His much younger contemporary Edward Dutkiewicz expressed his decades-long physical battle with multiple sclerosis more joyously, his sombre, thickly painted earlier work giving way, as his hands and body (but never his mind or humour) weakened, to playful abstract sculpture and line drawings as inimitable and original as the man himself.
Dutkiewicz was entirely self-taught, and as a young man won local arts prizes and ran workshops for children and young offenders. He moved to east London in the early 1980s. Between 1986 and 1994 he produced wall paintings and murals for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and had the first of two one-man shows at Flowers East gallery in Hackney. Later he exhibited in Paris, Cologne, Stockholm and San Francisco as well as London.
Dutkiewicz later produced a number of sculptures, mainly of human figures, animals and abstract forms executed in bronze and polished or painted steel. He received a number of commissions for public work: the architect Piers Gough, placed one of his monumental polished steel sculptures at Camden Lock; a female portrait resides in the garden at the Estorick Collection in Islington; and through the initiative of Susan Loppert pieces were installed at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.