Andrzej Dybowski

Andrzej Dybowski is a Polish concept artist and digital painter who works in the video game industry. In our catalogue he is represented by the wife's portraits from Layers of Fear, the psychological horror series made by the Kraków studio Bloober Team.

Background

According to the profile supplied with our catalogue, Dybowski grew up in Sopot on the Baltic coast in a family of artists, trained as an architect at the Gdańsk University of Technology, and took a course in digital painting before moving into games. The same profile places him at 4A Games, the studio behind the Metro series, as a senior concept artist working on Metro Exodus and the VR game Arktika.1. A Polish review of the original Layers of Fear (2016) singles out his original paintings in the game. We have not been able to confirm his employment history from an official credit list, so treat the details as provisional.

Painting for a game about a painter

Layers of Fear is set inside the mind of an obsessed painter, and its haunted house is lined with pictures that shift and decay as the player moves. The game borrows from art history, with nods to Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son and to Rembrandt, but the portraits of the painter's wife were made new for the game. They work like Victorian portraits gone wrong: the likeness stays polite while the surface and atmosphere turn threatening.

That is a different job from painting for a gallery wall. A game portrait has to read instantly at a distance, survive being lit by a flickering in-game lamp, and still hold up when the player walks right up to it. Dybowski's training in architecture and digital painting suits that kind of staged, environmental picture-making.

For the older traditions such pictures draw on, see Dark Academia and Death in Art.