Internationally acclaimed painter Boguslaw Lustyk has been named Gulfstream Park Racing & Casino’s Artist in Residence.

For two months beginning Jan. 30, an exhibition of his paintings will be displayed at the third-floor Chase Artwalk Gallery in the North and South Corridors off of the high-end restaurant Chase.

Gulfstream Park will host a reception at 7 p.m., Jan. 30 at the adjacent restaurant Chase to celebrate the Gallery’s opening with area gallery owners and art lovers.
Lustyk served as Artist in Residence at the Kentucky Horse Park in 1995-96 and was selected to be the official artist for the 1998 Kentucky Derby, joining past honorees such as Leroy Nieman and Peter Max. In that capacity, Lustyk designed posters, tickets and program covers for the Kentucky Derby and Kentucky Oaks, and his equine works were on exhibit at the Kentucky Derby Museum. 

His subjects’ bold colors, restless energy and expression of movement, soul and spirituality have garnered Lustyk over 20 awards and more than 60 solo and group exhibitions around the world. 

As a child in Poland, Lustyk developed a deep fascination with the equine form, and he diligently studied the structure and movement of the horse. His love of horses led him to create student-riding clubs and schools and organize horse trails in his native land.

“Horses for me are a very rich source of inspiration. They symbolize life, freedom, beauty, energy, movement, love, war and friendship,” said Lustyk. “The horse is like a spirit, like a god, with many faces, many incarnations and many personifications.”

Several years ago Lustyk moved his studio to Saratoga Springs, N.Y., the home of Saratoga Race Course, and he was commissioned to create five paintings for the nation’s oldest major racetrack.  He recently submitted proposals to design the artwork for the $1 million Florida Derby – which will be run Saturday, March 31 – and to paint a mural on the wall of Gulfstream Park’s new clubhouse.

His accomplishments have been widely noted.

“Lustyk's way of depicting a horse cannot be matched. The most outstanding painter of Polish romanticism, Piotr Michalowski, comes closest in spirit to his art,” said visual art critic and historian Aleksandra Kania, who noted, “Like all unconventional artists, Boguslaw Lustyk does not fit any standards. His art exemplifies his enormous creative capacity and arduous search for his own means of expression.”

Added William E. Cooke, director of the Kentucky Horse Park’s International Museum of the Horse, “Lustyk's art is born from passion, but is also reflective, structured but ever evolving, humanistic but with an absence of rhetoric, both wise and sensitive and yet unrestrained. It is created to be seen.”
Gulfstream Park’s race season runs Jan. 3 – April 22, and once again will feature the nation’s top jockeys, trainers, 3-year-olds and older horses. Lustyk, who watches horse races for “inspiration and atmosphere,” expects he will see many specimens to spark his creativity.

“I see horses in many different dimensions: dramatic, poetic, emotional and as metaphor. Everything is vibration, movement, the moment-to-moment dynamics.”