Henryk Opałka, *Sunflower*, 1996

57 x 71 cm, lithograph

He was born in 1929 in Marcoux, France. A Polish graphic artist specializing in lithography, he was the brother of Roman Opałka. During World War II, Opałka lived with his family in Germany. In the 1940s, he studied for four years under Hoffman and Petzolt at the Wunderlich School. Upon the end of the war, he returned to Bessèges, France. In 1946, he arrived in Poland. He worked for many years as a “master craftsman” in the lithography studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and at the Experimental Lithography Studio in Warsaw’s Saska Kępa district. Henryk Opałka’s students included, among others: Jolanta Błaszczyk, Małgorzata Chwiałkowska-Rakasz, Robert Kurzaj, Andrzej Newelski, Anna Socha-Jelonek, Grażyna Małowicka, Katarzyna Ortwein, Anna Sobol, Piotr Szancer, Krystyna Wąsik, and Kazimierz Makowski.