Piotr Kowalski

Born in Poland in 1926, Piotr Kowalski was a sculptor, mathematician and architect who lived and worked mainly in France until his death in 2004. After studying science and architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA, from 1947 to 1952, he worked as an architect from 1952 to 1957: in New York with I.M. Pei, in Paris with Marcel Breuer and Jean Prouvé, and then in his own office. In 1957, he left architecture and began sculpting. Piotr Kowalski is one of the pioneers of technological art, his various hats (art, science, engineering) enabling him to bring together practices that some believe to be culturally incompatible. His work includes monumental sculptures, interactive installations and more intimate pieces, all characterized by a desire to explore the links between space, time and human perception. His first major exhibition took place in Bern in 1963, and was followed by others in France (Centre Pompidou 1981), the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and elsewhere. More recently, Galerie Downtown François Laffanour (Paris 6) paid tribute to his work with an exhibition of architectural models and neon works in 2013.