ArtistPolish-Swedish
Jan Naliwajko
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Jan Naliwajko was born in 1938 in Vilnius, then part of Poland, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vilnius before relocating to Warsaw in the early 1960s. There he joined a generation of independent-minded artists who organized unauthorized group exhibitions in the Barbican district and surrounding areas of the Old Town between 1963 and 1967, a period of artistic ferment that ran against the grain of official socialist culture.
In 1968 he emigrated to Sweden, where he spent the rest of his working life. His practice spanned painting, printmaking, and sculpture, and he became particularly associated with relief compositions built from plexiglass, a material that allowed him to combine translucency, layering, and vivid surface effects in ways that oil or acrylic alone could not achieve. His figurative imagery drew on a personal vocabulary that fused religious iconography with erotic charge, creating compositions described by critics as charged with a vibrating, ecstatic quality.
Naliwajko exhibited internationally throughout his career, showing work in France, Switzerland, and the United States. He was personally acquainted with Salvador Dali, a connection that speaks to his engagement with the broader European surrealist and symbolist currents of the postwar decades. His canvases are typically dense with color and movement, placing solitary or paired figures in ambiguous, dream-inflected spaces.
Naliwajko died in Sweden in 2017. On the Nordic auction market his works appear regularly, particularly at Stockholm houses such as Metropol and SAV, where his plexiglass reliefs and acrylic figure studies attract consistent collector interest. Prices realized at Swedish auction have ranged up to approximately 2,900 SEK for relief compositions, with female figure studies in acrylic achieving similar levels, reflecting a stable secondary market for a distinctive voice in postwar Swedish-Polish figuration.