Grzegorz Rosinski

A comic artist, painter, graphic designer and illustrator, Grzegorz Rosinski was born in 1941 in Stalowa Wola, Poland. The artist Grzegorz Rosinski could be summed up in a single word: “movement.” He has only one fear: that of one day becoming trapped in a recognizable style. Thus, since his first drawings, published at the age of 16, he has never stopped evolving, advancing in his graphic quest. With his degree from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in hand, he became the star and artistic director of Relax, Poland’s first comic art magazine. But he always felt the need to look elsewhere, and he arrived in Belgium in 1976, eager to try his hand at Franco-Belgian comics. After his first album with Mythic, he met Jean Van Hamme, who wrote Thorgal for him—the great fantasy saga that would launch both their careers into orbit. And while Rosinski remains loyal to his collaborators and his readership, he is also endowed with a remarkable work ethic, allowing him to alternate his flagship series with various collaborations: Complainte des landes perdues (Complaint of the Lost Lands), with Jean Dufaux; Le Grand Pouvoir du Chninkel (The Great Power of Chninkel), based on a script by Jean Van Hamme; and Hans, with André-Paul Duchâteau, are just a few examples. Eager to advance in his quest to depict the material world, he subsequently abandoned pen and ink in favor of oil painting. It was using this technique that he created La Vengeance du Comte Skarbek (The Revenge of Count Skarbek), based on a story by Yves Sente. Starting in 2010, while continuing the original saga, Grzegorz Rosinski oversaw Les Mondes de Thorgal (The Worlds of Thorgal), various parallel series written by Yves Sente and Yann, and illustrated by Giulio De Vita and Roman Surzhenko. Grzegorz Rosinski stopped drawing Thorgal in 2018, after the thirty-eighth album: Aniel. He was replaced by Fred Vignaux, who had already authored two albums in the spin-off series Les Mondes de Thorgal (The Worlds of Thorgal).  A recipient of numerous awards, he notably won the Audience Award at the Angoulême Festival twice, in 1989 and 1996. His artwork has been the subject of numerous international exhibitions. In 2003, the Angoulême Festival dedicated a retrospective to him, which was subsequently presented in Sierre, Switzerland, and in Poland. In 2011, a major exhibition retraced his career, in the medieval town of Saint-Ursanne, Switzerland. In 2012, Rosinski signed an agreement with the mayor of Delémont, Switzerland, to establish a Rosinski Museum, and a retrospective exhibition dedicated to him was held in 2015. Scheduled for 2026, a major exhibition titled Grzegorz Rosinski in Illustration will be presented at the International City of Comics and Image in Angoulême, in collaboration with the EC1 Institute in Łódź, Poland, and the Polish Institute in Paris. Rosinski is also one of the few artists to have been the subject of an auction at Christie’s, in 2017. The Daniel Maghen Gallery is dedicating two exceptional retrospectives to him in 2020 and 2025. Grzegorz Rosinski lives and works in Switzerland.