Biography

Epifaniusz Drowniak, or Nikifor Krynicki under his pseudonym, was born in Poland in 1895. He spent the first years of his life living in poverty with his mother. Orphaned during the First World War, he found himself isolated and marginalized in his village of Krynica. Epifaniusz began using his nickname “Nikifor” as a child, and used it at his first exhibition in Warsaw in 1949. It’s not known when Nikifor began drawing and painting, but his aim seems to have always been to become a painter. His earliest surviving works…

Epifaniusz Drowniak, or Nikifor Krynicki under his pseudonym, was born in Poland in 1895. He spent the first years of his life living in poverty with his mother. Orphaned during the First World War, he found himself isolated and marginalized in his village of Krynica. Epifaniusz began using his nickname “Nikifor” as a child, and used it at his first exhibition in Warsaw in 1949. It’s not known when Nikifor began drawing and painting, but his aim seems to have always been to become a painter. His earliest surviving works date from 1920 and already demonstrate great effort and a genuine desire to perfect his technique. His work is commonly associated with naïve art and art brut.
Nikifor often depicts sacred themes in his work, with a particularly recurrent subject: the Greek Catholic church, whose image looms over the horizon. He also uses secular themes such as landscapes, architecture and portraits. His works on paper are always small-scale. Extremely poor, he used to reuse all kinds of materials (packaging, school books, etc.) and paint them on both sides. He lived from the sale of his drawings, “just enough to live on” in his own words. His reputation began to grow, however, in the 1950s-1960s, when collectors Ella and Andrzej Banach discovered his work. They exhibited, wrote and looked after him. From then on, he was exhibited in many countries (Poland, France, Belgium, Netherlands…), notably at the Galerie Dina Vierny in 1959. Another person took care of him from the 1960s onwards: Marian Włosiński, a painter who saw in Nikifor a great artist. His reputation continued to grow until his death in 1969. A museum was dedicated to him in 1995 in his native village of Krynica, as well as a biopic “Mój Nikifor”, in 2004.
The painter Edward Dwurnik said of him: “I have never experienced stronger emotions than those aroused by his paintings when seen in person. I first saw them in 1965. He was an accomplished painter, tall and deep, and he approached painting like the Renaissance masters – in a classical, honest way. Everything he painted was something he had SEEN. What he had seen was then reworked by his memory and imagination. He was perfect for freeing himself from the constraints of reality and creating a vision, a world, his own structure. He was telling his story and painting his world.”

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