Biography

Waldek Dynerman was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1951. In 1974 he graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, with an MFA in painting.

In 1983 he accepted a teaching position at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, where he taught as a full-time professor for 37 years. After his retirement from teaching, he moved to Emeryville to be closer to his family.

Dynerman works across several media that include painting, sculpture and printmaking.

He showed his work in over thirty solo shows. The most recent one titled “Putin’s War” was shown at the Carl Cherry Art Center in Carmel, CA in June 2023.

Dynerman also exhibited his work in over 70 group shows in the US, Poland, France and Sweden.

Artist statement

My father was a Holocaust survivor. Through his stories, I have developed a great empathy for victims of war conflicts and cannot stomach war rhetoric such as Trump’s praise for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I find the growing bigotry and racism troublesome, frustrating and infuriating. When making art, these thoughts and feeling are always present and may be expressed through brutal treatment of materials, fragmentation of the human form, or obvious deletions or obfuscation of meaning.

The major driving force in my work is drawn by a straight comparison between the persecution of the Jews and present-day oppression of people color; discrimination based on one’s religion, gender or cultural background.

While spending time in Berlin on an artist residency (2019), I worked on relief forms and sculpture utilizing cement, plaster, found objects, foam, sand, tar, and glass beads. In one way or another these works always spoke of some ambiguous trauma, either human, or one brought on nature.

After returning to the US, I became involved again with painting, working mostly on large scale works. I often start with something I see on the news, or something I read. I have made several paintings based on news photographs from the civil war in Syria, or images taken from the battlefields of WWI. As I finish with a painting, I almost immediately detach from it, and begin the process of forming ideas and collecting materials for the next. The new work is always a response to the one just made. They follow one another like chain links. I am interested foremost in the creating or making. Not knowing the outcome is my reward.

In September, 2021, after retiring from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, I relocated from Milwaukee to Emeryville, CA on the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay.