Józef Sękalski (1904–1972), painter, graphic artist and illustrator, born in Turek and educated at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Wilno University (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania), belonged to the generation of Polish artists whose lives were profoundly marked by the Second World War. His oeuvre, developed from the 1940s onwards in Scotland, was a material response to experiences of loss and forced migration and to the need to build a life from scratch, far from the world that had been lost.

In 1942, following the September Campaign, Sękalski was among nearly 80,000 Poles who joined the Polish Armed Forces then being formed in France under the authority of the Polish government-in-exile. Towards the end of the Second World War, he began to collaborate with the Polish Library in Glasgow, for which he produced a series of woodcut illustrations and covers. During this period he moved to St Andrews, where he created prints using a press he had constructed himself. It was there that he met his future wife, the painter Roberta Hodges. In the second half of the 1940s, he became involved with a group of woodblock printmakers in St Andrews, which he co-founded with Alison and Winifred McKenzie and Annabel Kidston. At the same time, he took up a post at the Glasgow School of Art and, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he joined the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and the Society of Scottish Artists. He gained a reputation not only as an artist but also as a teacher, working at the Dundee Institute of Art and Technology and at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design.

Selected Projects

• McManus Galleries, Dundee.
• National Galleries of Scotland, Modern Two (Edinburgh):

1.  “R. and J.: Book-plate for Roberta and Józef Sękalski”, 1951, woodcut, paper, 9.7 x 5 cm.
2. “Flying Shapes”, watercolour, gouache, pencil, paper, 48.1 x 36 cm.
3. “St Andrews Harbour Week Poster, 1st–8th July ” [commemorative print], linocut on paper, 58.9 x 45.5 cm.
4. “Man Reading”, brown chalk on paper, 38 x 28 cm 

Published in Glasgow:

1. “Umarli nie są bezbronni” by Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, illustrated by Józef Sękalski, Księżnica Polska, Glasgow 1943.
2. “A Call from Warsaw. An Anthology of Underground Warsaw Poetry”, translated by Albert Mackie and illustrated by Józef Sękalski, A Polish Library Pamphlet, Warsaw 1940 / Glasgow 1944.

• Victoria & Albert Museum, London:

1. “Canal Bridge at Bath”, 1948, woodcut, 15.24 x 12.7 cm,