Michał Walczyk

Pan Miś. Art brut artist from Szczawno-Zdrój, Poland: he carves linden wood, burns, paints and draws.

Born on 13 September 1993 in Wałbrzych, he lives and works in Szczawno-Zdrój in Lower Silesia. He is entirely self-taught. He drew from childhood, then discovered pyrography, and for more than a decade has been building his own world in a shed behind the family house: the Planet of Pan Miś.

Michał lives outside the usual abstractions. He does not use a watch or a calendar and does not count money. What he sees in his dreams goes straight onto wood.

Pseudonym: Pan Miś (“Mr Teddy Bear”)
Born: 13 September 1993, Wałbrzych, Poland
Studio: “Szopa” (the Shed), Szczawno-Zdrój
Field: Art brut, outsider art
Techniques: Carving in linden wood, pyrography, painting, drawing
Curator: Maciej Antoni Walczyk, the artist’s brother

„Życie nie ma sensu bo człowiek się rodzi i umiera. Rzeźbię i maluję, bo tak wyglądają moje sny.”

Pan Miś. “Life makes no sense, because a person is born and dies. I carve and paint because that is what my dreams look like.”

Why Pan Miś

He gave himself the name and told no one. The family discovered it on a painting he had signed “Pan Miś”: the Castle of the Piasts in Chojnów.

“Miś” comes from his first name: Maciej, the elder brother, chose the name Michał for the baby after his favourite plush koala. “Pan” (“Mr”) is the artist’s own addition and means a demand for respect: he is to be treated as an adult artist.

“Miś is connected with my name, and ‘Pan’… that comes from strangers calling me ‘Pan’, and that inspired me. (…) What I dislike most is when some people call me ‘Michaś’ or ‘Miś’, because ‘Michaś’ was fine when I was little, and that annoys me the most.”

Pan Miś, 2023 interview, translated from Polish

A light wooden board with the hand-burnt inscription PAN MIŚ — The artist’s signature burnt into a board.

From drawing to wood

The main moments.

1997–2000Grandfather Stefan’s night stories. A retired miner tells his grandson stories of the damned. This is where the love of miners, of the macabre and of storytelling itself comes from.
2001–2008Years of drawing. Thousands of drawings with the first monsters and hybrids. About 250 sheets survive in the “Box of Drawings”; the rest, thousands in the same style, were lost. What remains forms the cycle Archival Drawings: the style from before he discovered fire.
c. 2012Discovering fire. Towards the end of his years at a special-needs school a teacher introduces him to pyrography, drawing with a burning tool. Paper is no longer enough. Years later the same teacher will come to his exhibition at the Old Mine.
2012–2014The Shed. Michał begins working in the garden, under the roof where firewood used to dry. In 2014 the place gets walls and becomes the Shed. The first two-sided paintings appear, to save material.
2015–2020Creative fever. Dozens of linden figurines, Polish history, local legends, toothpick constructions. In 2017 “Sisyphus”, the first work commissioned by his brother.
2020A dream of an exhibition. During the pandemic his grandfather Janek, his closest friend, dies. Michał tells his brother he would like to show his work to the world.
2021“Entropia”. On 18 September, in Maciej’s flat, the first, unofficial exhibition: a present for his 28th birthday. In late autumn Maciej gives him a word for a new cycle. “Apocalypse” begins.
2022The second Shed. A black exhibition shed is built. The Czech collector Pavel Konečný visits Szczawno-Zdrój and opens the artist’s way to Europe.
2023Debut. Wałbrzych, Strzegom, Prague, Warsaw and Kraków in a single year. The exhibition “Geppetto Syndrome” comes with the first catalogue.
2024–2025Paris and Katowice. Works go to Galerie Christian Berst Art Brut; at the Silesian Museum “Apocalypse” gets its own pavilion, recreating the atmosphere of the Shed.
2026Still in the studio. The Muses stand together in the garden; in August “The Last Piast” is painted in three days.

Gallery: Christian Berst Art Brut, Paris
Collection: Treger Saint Silvestre, Portugal
Museum: Silesian Museum, Katowice (works in the collection)

Full project timeline with photographs (Polish)Exhibitions (Polish)

How he works

Linden, fire, paint and a sheet of description.

Linden wood: The basic material: soft, with a smell Michał loves. Something that lived comes back to life in his hands as a figurine.
Double sketch: Every work is first drawn in pencil, then its outlines are burnt in with a glowing tool. He does this even when paint will cover the lines. The smell of burning wood calms him.
Depth from blocks: Instead of painting perspective, he builds it: wooden blocks glued to the board push the figures into the foreground. Hence so many reliefs.
Two-sided works: Front and back show two versions of the same story or two of its moments. Such works have to be picked up and turned.
Art from leftovers: Wires, rusty nails and electronic parts go into the sculptures. He also paints on canvas, salvaged boards and plywood.
The sheet of description: To a finished work he adds a handwritten story of the character: name, origin, family and the reason it exists.

A board painting: three days in August 2025

A notebook sketch of five figures lies next to a board with the same drawing — 10 August. The notebook sketch redrawn in pencil on the board.

The board with five figures in dark, burnt outlines — 10 August. Outlines burnt in.

The same board painted: five figures in browns and greys on a golden ground — 12 August. Colour.

“As a short-sighted person I don’t see what others see… Thanks to colours I see what other people don’t.”

Pan Miś, translated from Polish

Black is his favourite colour: it reminds him of coal and of his grandfather’s work in the mine. Grey is the colour of ghosts, the sign of passing from the body to the afterlife. Purple means dignity.

The Shed

Pan Miś’s studio is two wooden sheds by the house in Szczawno-Zdrój. The first grew out of a roofed corner of the garden where wood was dried; Michał worked there from 2012 and the walls went up in 2014. Electricity, heating, a scroll saw, two pyrography tools and chisels followed. Here he works without a clock, in the smell of smoke and varnish.

The second Shed, for exhibiting, was built in 2022: five metres by two and a half, painted black inside and lit with LED strips. Since 2025 it holds only “Apocalypse”. Its atmosphere was recreated at the Silesian Museum, which treated the studio as part of the work.

Inside the black exhibition shed, figurines on a lit yellow table — The second Shed.

Two brothers

The Planet of Pan Miś has two hosts. Michał is its heart: he makes the work. His elder brother, Maciej Antoni Walczyk, is curator, scribe and archivist: he writes down the stories, catalogues the works and organises exhibitions.

The division is strict. Maciej does not interfere with Michał’s technique or with the logic of his world, and Michał does nothing but create. Sometimes the brother suggests a subject: a myth, a poem, a painting. The cycle “Mythology” began that way, and the Evil Spirit of “Apocalypse” was born after a reading of Baudelaire’s “Litany to Satan”.

At the Kraków opening Professor G. Borowik compared Maciej’s role to that of Theo van Gogh.

Two small boys on a plastic scooter, a photograph from 1998 — Maciej and Michał Walczyk, 1998.

Contact and links

Enquiries about works, exhibitions and publications: planetapanamisia@gmail.com. All channels and profiles. The rest of this site is in Polish; the language switcher in the header offers an automatic translation.