Zbigniew Frączkiewicz (1946-) - Polish sculptor, draughtsman, painter, designer of graphic signs, creator of medals, interested in applied design and photography, and recently also astrophotography. He spent his youth and childhood in Łódź, where he graduated from the Secondary School of Fine Arts in 1965. After this stage of his education, he began studying at the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 1971, he obtained his diploma with honours working under the supervision of Professor Tadeusz Łodziany. During his studies, in 1970, he won the main prize at the 1st National Sculpture Plein-Air organised in Legnica. After completing his studies, he made the important decision to leave Warsaw and start his career in the dynamically developing copper basin. This decision turned out to be crucial for his work, inspired by his childhood spent in industrial Łódź and his contacts with the people and industry of the copper basin. Over the following years, he lived in Legnica, Lubin, the village of Czerniec and Chocianów. At a young age, organising a space for himself to live and create, he cooperated as a visual artist with important establishments such as Zakłady Mechaniczne Legmet in Legnica (1971-1972), the Mechanical Equipment Factory and the town of Chocianów (1972-2022). From 1972 he worked as an assistant to Professor Borys Michałowski at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław. In 1973, he settled in Lubin, where he served as district visual artist (1973-1976). It was then that an important project was realised to humanise this city-block, the idea of which was later transferred (although not realised) to the Mechanical Equipment Factory in Chocianów. In creating this project, Frączkiewicz invited the architect Professor Oskar Hansen, his former lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, to collaborate with him. Already during his studies, the artist showed interest in stone sculpture, but it was his participation in sculpture plein-airs as a participant, and sometimes as an organiser (in places such as Dresden - Rotwendorf, Osetnica, Burgas, Carrara, Fanano, Targoszyn, Borów), that gave him the opportunity to realise works of larger dimensions. In 1980-1984, he was the initiator and organiser of the sculpture plein-air "Borów - Chocianów 1980", which attracted leading Polish sculptors and set new artistic directions in the social reality of the time. The artist is active in many creative areas. He creates drawings, paintings, graphic signs, medals, performances, happenings and videos, but sculpture remains his main field of activity. Frączkiewicz's sculptural oeuvre is highly varied in terms of the materials used (iron castings, sculptures made of marble, granite, concrete, bronze, steel), forms (realistic figures, e.g. Tadeusz Gumiński, Wincenty Witos, as well as partly abstract sculptures, such as Henryk Karliński or Jan Wyżykowski), and the size of the objects. There are some small-scale monuments in his oeuvre, such as the screaming heads 'Scream' from 1970 and 'Woman' from 1973. However, numerous monumental works are also part of his oeuvre, such as the "To the People of the Earth" in Jerzmanowa from 1978-1985, the monument to the Victims of Fascism in Chocianów from 1977, the monument to the Memory of the Victims of Lubin '82 from 1992 or the seven-metre-high statue of the crucified Christ, created on the commission of the Millennium Cross Building Committee in Bolesławiec (2000-2001). On 9 May 2001, in the courtyard of the Albert Einstein Gymnasium in Berlin, the inauguration of the sculpture 'We of the 20th Century', which was created in 1999 for the city of Greiz, took place. Three sculptures from the 'Iron People' series are located in Hattingen and one in Mainz. The artist's works have been exhibited in Mainz, Hanover, Fellbach, Worpswede, Karlsruhe, Vienna and Berlin, among others. Zbigniew Frączkiewicz's works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Copper in Legnica, the Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, the Lower Silesian Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Wrocław, as well as in private collections in Poland, Germany, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands.