Dr. Marek Bartelik briefly studied art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris after moving from Poland to France in 1981. Bartelik holds a Master of Science degree in Civil Engineering from Columbia University and a PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Between 1996 and 2016 he taught modern and contemporary art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Yale and MIT.
Bartelik was a Graduate Critic-in-Residence at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (2006-2011). As an art critic, he served as President of AICA-USA (2008-May 2012) and served as the XVth President of AICA International (International Association of Art Critics), which gathers 4500 critics in 63 national sections around the world, between 2012 and 2018.
He lectures nationally and internationally, among other places, at MoMA in New York; the Boston Museum of Art in Boston; the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw; the Municipal Museum in the Hague and the Mondrian House in Amersfoort, Holland; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Pinacoteca, São Paulo, Brazil. He curated museum shows of, among other artists, Mark Rothko, Adja Yunkers and Anna Bella Geiger, as well as numerous gallery shows in the US and Europe.
His articles appeared in, among other magazines and newspapers, CAA Art Journal, Art in America, ArtNews. American Art and Artforum—for which he has written exhibition reviews from more than 20 countries on four continents. He has appeared on TV in France, Poland, Turkey, China, and Taiwan.
His books include: The Sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1996), co-authored with Dore Ashton and Matti Megged; To Invent a Garden: The Life and Art of Adja Yunkers (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2000); Early Polish Modern Art: Unity in Multiplicity by the Manchester University Press, Manchester, England, November 2005 (England), December 2005 (USA)—for which he has received PIASA’s 2007 Waclaw Lednicki Humanities Award; editor of POZA: On the Polishness of Contemporary Polish Art (Hartford, CT: Real Art Ways, 2008);and GDR/DDR: Contemporary German Painting from Portuguese Collections (Lisbon, Portugal: ARTing, 2008). His debut volume of poetry, East Sixth Street: 50 poems, was published by 7Letras in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in december 2006. His first book in Polish, Lagodny deszcz (Gentle rain) was released by Fundacja Twarda Sztuka in December 2010; the book’s English version is scheduled to be published in 2016. He is currently working on a book about his dachshund Toby.
In 2002, he became a US citizen.
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