Waldemar Januszczak

Born, 1954 in Basingstoke, UK

British art critic. Formerly the art critic of The Guardian, he now writes for The Sunday Times, and has twice won the Critic of the Year award. Januszczak is also a film maker of television arts documentaries and the Director of ZCZ Films. He curated Room at the Top, a group exhibition that took place at Nicola Jacobs Gallery, 9 Cork Street, 6 February - 9 March 1985. The artists included in the exhibition were: Sonia Boyce, Mary Mabbutt, Paul Richards, Gerard de Thame, and Adrian Wiszniewski. The exhibition was one of the very few such undertakings, during the 1980s, in which the work of a Black artist (in this instance, Sonia Boyce), was exhibited alongside work by white artists. Boyce was for a while an artist with whom Januszczak, (at the time, visual arts reviewer for the Guardian), was particularly impressed.

In his Room at the Top essay, Januszczak wrote “Sonia Boyce’s art fills you with a sensation of intimacy. She performs one of art’s classic functions in helping you to see something more clearly. In this case what we are seeing, or rather over-hearing, is the private plight of a young black woman in a dominant white society. The captions which appear below some of her pictures re-tell half-remembered stories which a mother once told her young daughter, stories about her past, about the place she comes from. We glimpse the artist’s unsettled dreams. We are given an insight into the strain between a black woman and her white lover. When Sonia Boyce allows you into the sanctuary of her room she allows you into her life.”

»  Ordure of no merit

Article relating to an exhibition, 1998

»  Room at the Top

Catalogue relating to an exhibition, 1985

»  Waldemar Januszczak | There is a world elsewhere

Review relating to an exhibition, 1986