Description
Andrew Jerzy Lech was born in 1955 in Wroclaw. He is one of the most important Polish documentary filmmakers. Photographer, artist and enthusiast living and working since 1989 in New Jersey and New York. From 1981 to 1984 he studied at the Department of Artistic Photography at the Art Conservatory in Ostrava, Czech Republic. He is a traveling photographer, working in black and white classical technique. In the 1980s he was associated with a group of photographers active in the Foto-Medium-Art Gallery in Wroclaw. In 1986-1987 he ran his home private Gallery on the Road in Opole. He was the creator of important exhibitions for the development of recent Polish photography, such as "Swiss Calendar, 1912", "30 Photographs", and "Travel Diary". He has exhibited his photographs internationally, including Fotokina in Cologne, at the PhotoPlus Exhibition in New York, at the Foto-Fest in Houston, Texas, and at the Fourth International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Florence, receiving the Medici Medal for his presentation of photographs from the "Traveling Diary" series. In 2005 he received the prestigious J. Owen Grundy Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award from the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy. His works are in private and corporate collections, galleries and museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art in Lodz, the National Museum in Wroclaw, the National Museum in Gdansk, the Silesian Collection of Contemporary Art in Katowice, the Jersey City Museum in New Jersey, and the Icon Pictures Collection and the Pfizer Collection of Art on Paper in New York. In 2021, Andrzej Jerzy Lech's 2011 retrospective exhibition, curated by Krzysztof Jurecki, was purchased for the collection of the Center for Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Toruń.