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Prominent Polish sculptor Adam Myjak passed away at 78

06.04.2025 20:22
Adam Myjak, one of Poland’s most outstanding sculptors, has passed away at the age of 78. The country's Ministry of Culture and National Heritage has described him in a obituary as a pre-eminent artist whose singular achievements in the arts and teaching won him the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Reborn Poland and the Gold ‘Gloria Artis’ Medal for Cultural Merit.
The late prof. Adam Myjak - one of Polands top sculptors
The late prof. Adam Myjak - one of Poland's top sculptorsPAP/Tomasz Gzell

The Fine Arts Academy in Warsaw praised on its website Myjak’s services for Polish culture and the Academy. “He was an extraordinary personality, a great artist and a man of unquestionable prestige”, the website added.

A graduate of the Warsaw Fine Arts Academy, Myjak served as a professor at its Sculpture Department for many years, and as the Academy’s Rector for more than two decades.

Myjak had over a hundred one-man shows of his works in Poland and abroad.

In the 1980s, Myjak designed, together with fellow artist Janusz Pastwa, a memorial in tribute to Polish officers murdered by the Soviets at Katyń Forest in 1940, to be erected at the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw. It featured an inscription “To Polish soldiers resting in the Katyń land”.

“The communist authorities wanted us to change the inscription and write that the Katyń crime was perpetrated by the Germans. High-ranking officers were trying to intimidate us, resorting even to blackmail, but we refused to yield to pressure. As the result, the granite memorial landed in a cemetery warehouse for ten years”, Pastwa recalls in reminiscences of Myjak.

Myjak’s other works include the Homo Homini monument in Kielce, southern Poland, dedicated to the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, and the busts of composer Krzysztof Penderecki and Poland’s Solidarity leader and Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki.

In 2019, Myjak received an honorary doctorate from the National Academy of Fine Arts in the Ukrainian town of Lviv.

(mk/mm)