SEBASTIAN KROK The end point by point, that is calibration of the twilight zone
Opening: 19.09.2025, opening hour: 18.00
Open until: 31.10.2025, opening hours: TUE-SAT 12.00-18.00
Two guided tours are planned:
September 27 and October 11 at 12:00 p.m.
/ free admission /
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The end point by point, that is calibration of the twilight zone
The end of memory can be—in certain circumstances—a blessing. We don’t want to remember something because the feeling of loss hurts. Sometimes it hurts so much that it robs us of our ability to think rationally. In such moments, we dream of erasing everything—events, images, emotions. Of the silence after memories. What remains after they’re gone? Only a blank screen and the final inscription: The End.
And in the end – emptiness. A space that needs to be filled with something.
According to anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, accepting one’s mortality has a profoundly transformative power. However, it is a difficult task—especially in a contemporary reality that has abandoned the eschatological world order. Death has been repressed, and with it, the possibility of finally exercising oneself.
French philosopher Pierre Hadot wrote: “Philosophy is the practice of death and the training for it. To practice dying,” he adds, “is to practice abandoning one’s individuality, to perceive reality in the dimension of universality and objectivity.”
This approach—deeply anti-individualistic—doesn’t find an easy place today. It’s difficult to reconcile it with Western culture, dominated by materialism and narratives of absolute success. In this context, any attempt to “calibrate the twilight zone”—that is, to work with the end, the void, memory, death—becomes an act of courage. And resistance.
In his works, Sebastian Krok experiments with both content and form – paintings and painterly installations. For the artist, the material he creates from is as important as the representational layer. Used hospital bedding, post-accident car bodies – these are not just materials but carriers of the histories of the bodies they were meant to protect. They become prosthetics of memory, similar to Aki Kaurismäki’s film The Man Without a Past, whose protagonist – deprived of memories – attempts to rebuild his world from fragments of reality. The artist finds beauty not in what is pretty and polished, but in what is rough, untamed, and full of cracks.
Krok creates totems of everyday life from these fragments—objects saturated with emotion, the burden of experience, the uncertainty of existence. His art operates within the realm of matter bearing traces—of trauma, injury, touch. He transforms abandoned and degraded materials, giving them new life. Each work becomes a point—a piece of a puzzle that attempts to embrace the end and restore meaning to what has been lost.
The artist is a keen observer of the surrounding reality – especially everyday life in Poland, post-transformation. He captures its paradoxes, tensions, and fractures. He juxtaposes the world of drug-fueled escapism with a reality from which escape is impossible. All that remains is color – intense, saturated, liminal – which carries within itself a metaphysical truth.
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Sebastian Krok (born 1985) is a painter, author of painting installations, and holds a PhD in Fine Arts. In 2014, he graduated with distinction from the Leon Tarasewicz Painting Space Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he currently works as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Media Art. He has won numerous competitions and the Grand Prix, including the First International Festival of Fine Arts and Design FISAD in Turin (2015) and the 43rd edition of the Bielska Jesień Biennale (2017). The artist has presented his works in solo exhibitions at the Bielska BWA Gallery, m² Gallery in Warsaw, Sektor I Gallery in Jaworzno, the Art Gallery in Legnica, the Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw, and the Mazovian Centre for Contemporary Art “Elektrownia” in Radom. He has participated in group exhibitions in Poland and abroad, including in the National Museum in Gdańsk, the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània in Valencia, the Accademia Albertina in Turin, the Mocak Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, and the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko. The artist’s works are in the collections of the National Museum in Gdańsk, the BWA Bielska Gallery in Bielsko-Biała, and the PKO Bank Polski Art Collection in Warsaw.
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