Aleksander Werner

The artist died in London on 11 September 2011, shortly before his 91st birthday. A tribute to his art was demonstrated again at the POSK gallery in his Retrospective Exhibition, held in September 2012.

Werner suffered a disabling stroke in 1996 that left him with limited speech and paralyzed down his right side. This prevented him from pursuing his sculptural creativity but, after a long and determined struggle, he was able to continue his creation of colleges, small paintings and drawings. It was a personal triumph for him to be able to attend, in his wheelchair, the opening of an exhibition of his work to date at the POSK Gallery (Hammersmith, London) in 2001.

In the early 1960s Werner turned to sculpture. In a major solo exhibition of his work from this period, held in the Drian Gallery in London in the early 1970s, he included almost 50 dynamic pieces in fired clay. His public sculpture commissions included pieces for the Church, for industry and for a number of public buildings throughout the United Kingdom. A large collection of his work is also displayed in Torun, Poland, which exhibits him as a prominent European artist of the 20th century. At the end of the 1960s, the artist created a monumental aluminium relief for the Acton offices of CAV Ltd in London. In 1971, a ceramic mural decorated the headquarters of the Board of TESCO. A gilt bas-relief found a home in front of a tabernacle in a Manchester church. From 1976, Werner’s sculpture was created from fused glass.

During his first years in Britain, Werner concentrated on painting and printmaking, and his intricate woodcuts were exhibited in London, Switzerland, Italy and the United States. In 1954–55 Werner was chosen to represent Great Britain in the Victoria and Albert Museum's Colour Woodcut Exhibition. His "dramatic" style made his woodcuts popular as book jacket illustrations in the 1950s. Werner took part in British and international exhibitions of woodcuts until 1963. He also taught wood engraving.

Aleksander Stanislaw Werner (1920–2011) was a Polish émigré artist who worked for most of his professional life in Great Britain. He worked in paint, collage, woodcut print, and sculpture.

Aleksander Stanislaw Werner was born on 13 September 1920, in Brwinow, Poland. He was descended from three generations of artistic tradition, and his family can be traced back to Joseph Werner in a line of recognized Polish painters. Both sides of his family embraced art. His grandfather, Kristopher II Werner, was a painter and architect. Werner's father, Aleksander Werner (1886–1920), was a graduate of the Kraków Academy of Fine Art, but his life as an emerging artist was truncated when he died in the Polish–Soviet War of 1920. He left behind his pregnant wife, Maria. Werner, born after his father's death, inherited his paintbrushes and a box of paints.