MARTIN NIELABA

Martin Nielaba was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1963. He has lived in Poland, Germany, Switzerland and France throughout his life. Since 2024, he has been residing in France.

Following in the footsteps of his father Henryk, a Polish Olympic medalist in fencing, he originally focused his professional career on sport. Nielaba trained in fencing, both as a youth in Warsaw and professionally – after moving to Germany in 1983 – at the world-famous fencing center in Tauberbischofsheim. He also began studies at the Sports Academy in Cologne. He eventually abandoned this career path in 1985, in order to completely devote himself to his passion – fine art.

Nielaba’s paintings are not only the result of preserving in the medium the projection of his own imagination, but above all, his work is a consistent study, aimed at grasping the most basic aspect of the multidimensional animation of the seemingly lifeless solid mass. For years, he has been painting on a variety of surfaces, using self-developed tools and techniques, analyzing the process of motion through the dynamics of form.His works are the result of the absolute simplification of form and the transfer of knowledge from contemporary science into the universal language of visual art.

Since the early 1990’s, Nielaba’s work has represented a synthesis of art forms. He has been creating coherent closed form works of art, bound by a perfectly clear and smooth surface, thanks to his development of a resin lacquer mixture, which he uses to sculpt a “lens” coating on his oil works, through an application technique of his own invention. The viewer perceives the coating as a glass surface covering the painting. For Nielaba, this is the definition of the simplified aspect of a closed form’s visual dimension. Completely integrated with its painted foundation, the surface meets the morphology of the painting, creating a consistent whole of the spatial object, encompassing both the question and the answer contained in the art form. The absolute clarity and reflective quality of the surface allows the viewer to have a second look at the dynamic process of motion and the fractal division of the form into separate elements, without actual disruption of the form’s consistency. Nielaba calls this process the “defractation of abstraction.” The classical sketch of a horse, appearing in some of his works, is used only to manifest the hardly noticeable process of motion within form.

Thanks to the resin lacquer coating, Nielaba’s oil paintings can be explored not only through vision, but also by touch – a way usually forbidden by museums and galleries in the case of other oil paintings. His oil paintings have been and are meant to be exhibited outside, in public spaces, in their original form, regardless of weather conditions. This is a true innovation in the world of art. 

Nielaba has had solo exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, France and Poland.