Adrian Wiszniewski was born in Glasgow in 1958. He studied architecture at the Mackintosh School of Architecture before commencing a degree in fine art at Glasgow School of Art from 1979 to 1983.
He made his name as the most distinctive and dynamic of the famous ‘New Glasgow Boys’, a term coined for the Glasgow School of Art graduates who led the revival of Scottish figurative painting during the 1980s. Worldwide exhibitions of the group’s work confirmed their international standing, as did their acclaimed Edinburgh Festival exhibition ‘The Vigorous Imagination’, held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1987.
Wiszniewski’s gift is his intrepid versatility. He loves to experiment, explore, surprise. His portrayals of languid young men inhabiting dreamlike Arcadian settings combine strong, linear draughtsmanship with the appealing innocence of decorative visual poetry. His work thus hints at Britain's long tradition of Romantic art while remaining fundamentally contemporary.
Wiszniewski started using neon in 1989 as an antidote to his heavily worked canvases and as a direct means of communicating to a new audience. Duncan Miller comments in his introduction to William Hardie's 1994 exhibition:
"Neon signs are composed of colour and line, the two most basic elements of the language of western painting. In Wiszniewski's neon works colour and line are as completely alive as in any painting, yet they are freed from the burden of artistic 'self-expression' by the way they are reduced to mechanical form. Works like these are a new, technological version of that idealism which links Matisse's paper cut-outs to the neo-classical tradition."
Wiszniewski’s work can be found in 33 major public collections including M.O.M.A. in New York, Tate in London and Setegaya in Tokyo.
