BARTOSZ KOKOSIŃSKI / PAWEŁ MATYSZEWSKI THE WONDER YEARS

Opening: 17.03.2017, opening hour: 18.00

Open until: 21.04.2017, opening hours: MON.-SAT. 12.0018.00

MAIL

Bartosz Kokosiński and Paweł Matyszewski in their joint exhibition The Wonder Years.

The title of the exhibition The Wonder Years is a reference to an American TV-series from 1988-1993. The show was aired on public television in Poland when the artists (born in 1984) were in their youth. Now they return to the carefree years of their lives, wondering whether this current time may mean the same for their artistic quest. They have been very active and participated in many exhibitions in Poland and abroad. Furthermore, even though a good deal of publications on their art have already been issued, they both still find strength for creating new surprising things!
The exhibition at the Biała Gallery is going to be an experimental one, as the artists themselves will try to juxtapose their works by making them enter into dialog to create an active narration. It is the actual juxtaposition that will allow for saying more about the exhibition and its interpretation. The artists are going to choose their pieces intuitively and only after confronting them in the gallery space, they will make an attempt to provide them with new meanings resulting from the relations developed between various works of art. One of the reasons for organizing this exhibition was connected with certain characteristics that both artists share. Their art is marked with destruction and corporality, which, however, is presented in a different, and yet complementary way. What both artists also have in common is this sort of obsessive drive to look into subjects connected with destruction and catastrophism in relation with art, art history and modern times. What is more, in their work, they use objects taken out of their original context. As for the current show, they will also touch upon religious themes referring to the gallery space located in the former convent.

Jan Gryka

 

 

Bartosz Kokosiński
Born in 1984 in Siewierz. Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. In 2009, he got his diploma in the Faculty of Painting in the studio of Andrzej Bednarczyk and Witold Stelmachniewicz. He attended classes conducted by Grzegorz Sztwiertnia and Konrad Kuzyszyn. His main interest is the medium of painting, which – along with his collection of everyday objects – he uses to create paintings devouring reality. His works have been presented in Poland, Germany, Austria, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the Netherlands, France, the USA, the Czech Republic, Greece and Hungary. He won Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for Artists, provided by a Canadian foundation, and received an award of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland. He also participated in the international artists-in-residence program held by Center for Contemporary Art MeetFactory Prague, in the Czech Republic.

www.bartoszkokosinski.com

 

Paweł Matyszewski
Born in 1984 in Białystok. Graduated from the Faculty of Painting of the University of Arts in Poznań. He got his diploma in 2009 in the painting studio of prof. dr hab. Piotr C. Kowalski. In 2014, he took up Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Studies in the Faculty of Multimedia Communication of the Poznań University of Arts, under dr hab. Dominik Lejman. Matyszewski is a painter, the author of art objects and installations. His works have been presented in Poland, Austria, Germany, Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus, Spain and Serbia. In 2014, he was awarded a scholarship by the National Center for Culture and in 2012 – by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland. He is interested in a widely understood marginality of various phenomena and behavior oscillating between culture and biology. He combines the language of realism with abstraction, the image with the object.

www.pawelmatyszewski.com