Henry Orlik German, b. 6 January 1947

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Biography
Orlik at Gloucester College of Art, Cheltenham
Orlik at Gloucester College of Art, Cheltenham

CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION
Henry Orlik was born in Ankum, Germany two years after the end of the Second World War in 1947. His father, Jozef Orlik (1923-1998) was Polish and in the Allied Armed Forces under British Command during the war. His mother, Lucyna was of White Russian (Belarussian) origin and amidst the horrors of Nazi invasions had been deported for slave labour and put in a labour camp in Ankum, Lower Saxony in Germany, where she worked as a farm labourer. Jozef was part of the Polish forces who spearheaded the advance after D Day in the spring of 1945 that liberated the occupied countries of Northern France, Belgium, Holland and finally in May 1945 into Lower Saxony in Germany. It was here that the couple met, married and had Henry. Lucyna was nineteen years old.


Having fought bravely to get their country back, Polish servicemen found themselves without a home once the war had ended. To accommodate Poles unable to return to their home country, Britain enacted the Polish Resettlement Act 1947, Britain's first mass immigration law. Thousands of displaced Poles decided to come to Britain where they were housed in resettlement camps in the disused metal corrugated Nissen huts of the Army and Air force camps. These were initially set-up for a period of two years but many camps continued into the 1950s and 60s, evolving into self- contained Polish villages with churches and schools. Many Poles spent the rest of their lives in the camps and a whole generation of children grew up in them.

 

The Orlik family came to England in 1948 and were initially itinerant moving between different camps. They came to Fairford Camp in the early 1950s on the fringes of the Cotswolds, the largest of the many Polish Resettlement Camps operational from 1947 to 1958. They were here for two years and then were transferred to Daglingworth Camp in Gloucestershire. The young Orlik was sent to a Polish Boarding school in Hereford from the age of seven to twelve. The family stayed at Daglingworth until 1959, when, like many Polish families, they moved to Swindon. Jozef found work building the Rover factory in Swindon and then worked on the car assembly line there. Lucyna worked at Plessey Semiconductors. Orlik went to English school in Cirencester from the age of twelve to thirteen and then to St Joseph’s Roman Catholic School in Swindon until he was sixteen. After this, in 1963 he went to Swindon Art College for three years. He continued his studies at Gloucester College of Art, Cheltenham (1969-1972).

 

CAREER AND EXHIBITIONS
Henry was already making a name for himself by 1971 when he showed People (gouache) at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1971. In 1972 he had a highly successful one man show at the world-renowned Surrealist Art Centre, Acoris, in Brook Street, London W1 when he was only twenty-five, from which all his paintings sold. An article in Apollo magazine stated, Orlik ‘has seized on a surrealistic idiom to display his hermetic vision of the irrational. Colours are muted and unearthly, giving a curious pallor to his enigmatic images, which are conveyed by innuendo and oblique implication. Intertwined female figures writhe in and out of one another in grotesque convoluted embrace culminating in a wild tangle of hair. Contrived theatrical stage sets occupied by the standard unexpected juxtapositioning of surrealistic devices are subject-matter for many pictures, as well as macabre landscapes. Orlik’s technical manner is to work over the surface with meticulous care, using minute strokes of a fine brush. The result is one of monotonous regularity that depersonalizes the surface but contributes to the eerie quality haunting his imagery.’
A review for the same exhibition in Art & Antiques magazine describes Orlik drawing much of his inspiration from ‘his heritage’ which was ‘regularly charged by frequent visits to his homeland of Byelo Russia, on the Polish-Russian border’. It continues: ‘His works – in both oil and acrylic, one of them on glass – are technically brilliant and his observations, while cynical, scarcely lack humour. Despite the dream-like quality imparted by a network of infantile squiggles which characterise his paintings, Mr. Orlik firmly rejects any label. “Surreal?” he said, taking a long look around the walls of the gallery. “They say I’m surrealistic. I just paint. It’s a lucky break, though, if it wasn’t for this show I’d still be teaching.” At his private view last week 80 percent of the pictures were snapped up. It would be false modesty on Mr. Orlik’s part if he attributed that solely to luck – and I don’t think his publicity people will be referring to him as unknown for very much longer.’

 

Orlik participated in Acoris’ mixed Surrealist Masters exhibitions in 1972 and 1974. In these exhibitions his work was exhibited alongside many of the most well-known Surrealist artists including Salvador Dali (1904-1989), Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), René Magritte (1898-1967), Roberto Matta (1911-2002), Francis Picabia (1879-1953), Óscar Dominguez (1906-1957), Brauner (1903-1966), Yves Tanguy (1900-1955), Max Ernst (1891-1976), Leonor Fini (1907-1996) André Masson (1896-1987) and Hans Bellmer (1902-1975). In the 1974 exhibition he showed four paintings: Anachrist (1973, no. 49), Oasis (no. 50), Human Landscape (1973, no. 51) and The Encounter (1973, no. 52).

 

Orlik had further one man shows in 1974 at Stooshnoff Fine Arts in Brook Street, London WI; in 1978 at the Obelisk Gallery in Crawford Street, London W1 (which exhibited Magritte’s work) and in the same year at Drian Galleries in Porchester Place, London W2 which was owned by a fellow Pole, the painter Halima Nałęcz who played her part in the blossoming of the modern art movement in London. In 1983 Orlik exhibited in New York at 80 Washington Square East Galleries, New York University.

 

From 1972 to 1980 Orlik lived in Earl’s Court, London, which was known as the ‘Polish Corridor’ in the 1950s. In 1981 he moved to the US for four years, living in Los Angeles for six months to get inspiration which is reflected in his City Landscapes. He moved to New York and returned to live in London (Kensington) in 1985. In November 1994, the London Borough of Camden Arts Services presented a Retrospective of Orlik’s art from the period 1970 to 1994 which was exhibited at Exhibition Hall, Swiss Cottage Central Library, London NW3.

 

Orlik exhibited rarely at galleries after the early 1980s, taking a stance against art dealers whom he saw as taking the lions’ share of the profits and about whom he took several swipes in his art. He sold quite a few paintings privately but shied away from publicity. He was supported by his mother who was devoted to her only son and who made financial investments on his behalf. When she died Orlik was left financially secure. In his later career, Orlik had no desire or time to market his artwork and concentrated on painting, dedicating his time to exploring his imagination through his painting. Sadly, in 2022, Orlik suffered a stroke which paralysed his right side and he continues in poor health; this has been exacerbated by being evicted from his flat by his housing association and the subsequent loss of over two hundred of his paintings which were taken from his studio while he was in hospital.

 

ORLIK’S ART

Orlik paints an original, imaginative, often-witty cosmos in which isolated images mingle, creating ‘waves of unreality over what was formerly the real world’. He employs soft colours to create his metaphysical land and seascapes and we enter his dream constructions and rooms which take us on flights of fancy bringing a surge of thoughts and associations as objects become weighted with tantalising meaning and symbolic suggestions. A flood of memories is triggered when a form is seen and in Orlik’s paintings seemingly disparate images give a haunting sense of déjà vu as they play on the imagination communicating ‘poetically from soul to soul’. Recurring themes and objects resurface: circus and clowns, cityscapes, rooms without walls, sleep and dreams, flight, time and the desert. The objects are suggestive and assertive and offer all sorts of psychological connections and free associations with which the viewer attempts to penetrate the often- impenetrable combination of images to create a subjective interpretation. Oneiric value is given to his images and it is as if these things could exist if atoms had formed in a different way – and why not, for as Bachelard states ‘the imagination is never wrong’.

 

Orlik’s paintings are made up of small squiggles which form into larger shapes of seemingly coherent images, creating forms of recognisable, almost-recognisable and unrecognisable objects. Orlik stated, ‘I try to make every square inch of each canvas a painting in itself’ and he developed a technique which he called ‘Excitation’ whereby, with a thin brush, he painted tiny, curved strokes throughout the painting. The surface of the canvas, however, remains uncluttered and the small brushstrokes create a harmonious balance within the painting. There is space between objects and a clean and measured construct. Orlik’s internal psychological landscapes are given concrete physical spaces which mix the earthy and the ethereal. He derived his ‘Excitation’ technique and name after reading about Danah Zohar and her work on Quantum physics, in which she combines physics, philosophy and psychology with a theory of the origins and nature of consciousness, offering a vision of the human self and its relationships with all systems of the cosmos (‘living quantum systems’) including human society and the individuality of each person. Orlik’s small brushstrokes suggest the fundamental energy and matter which makes up the universe acting on every scale, from a single to a complex compound entity. His interpretations of a metaphysical reality become ‘clues to yet boundless, undisclosed and perhaps, as yet, unthinkable experience.’

 

Orlik had a very deep love for and bond with his mother; over the years they exchanged hundreds of letters and Orlik retains all the objects that his mother collected from his childhood; put simply she, 'was the colour and light' of his life. Lucyna's Slavic and Russian cultural heritage resonated with him and he was particularly influenced by Russian literature, especially Dostoyevsky. In the 1970s he was able to meet his Grandmother when he visited her in Belarus on the border with Poland. His visits to Russia had a profound influence on his art and his experience there of people working on the land, informed his idea of the connections of micro- and macrocosms – between the human body and the landscape. He stated, ‘The idea of mother earth with organic shapes and forms impressed me very strongly on a recent trip through the agricultural areas of Russia where people live by nature and its seasons.’ He painted several landscapes based on the Russian (Belarusian) landscape, including Russian Haystacks (1971) and Large Russian Landscape (1972) (both in the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe).

 

Orlik stated, ‘People are most important’ and although people (as figures) are not included in all of his paintings, the paraphernalia and shapes in a landscape pertain to the human, either by connection through form or objects as memory. When they are not present, their presence is suggested by the shape of objects.