© All rights reserved Grzegorz Drozd
Grzegorz Drozd
Nowy rok w wiosce Nan Tajlandia, 135 x110 cm, oil on canvas, olej na półutnie, 2010 © Grzegorz Drozd
Kolkata, 130 x150 cm, oil on canvas, olej na płótnie, 2010 © Grzegorz Drozd
Koniec świata Budapeszt / The end of the world Budapest, 100 x 80 cm, oil on canvas, olej na płótnie, 2010 © Grzegorz Drozd
Budapest, 110 x 130 cm, oil on canvas, olej na płótnie, 2010 © Grzegorz Drozd
Exhibition view: "The Rise of the White Gypsy, Piktogram Gallery, Poznań PL 2010
The exhibit will consists of three elaborate works created specifically for this event by Grzegorz Drozd, Honza Zamojski and Konrad Smoleński during their stay in the Czech Republic. Honza Zamojski walked the trail of “the death of the handsome deer”, studying traces of Ota Pavel’s life, sharing with him landscapes and passions, mainly those for chance events. As his deceased guide, Honza plunged into the chasm of workoholism and came up with a sophisticated art book about his wanderings, the fictitious and actual places as well as histories evoked by Pavel’s biography. Grzegorz Drozd, a prestidigitator and con-man who mercilessly mocks the artifice of art, will demonstrate his painter’s version of an encyclopaedia. Konrad Smoleński, in turn, will show a movie screened on two displays, where the soundtrack is as important as silence an image is as significant as a black screen.
Through the use of different media, the show analyses communicative situations, functions of generated messages, their sources and the environment in which various forms of elocution (verbal, embodied, discursive, etc.) determine our behaviour and our own image within the network of human and non-human, dead and alive co-participants of our world.
Honza Zamojski indicates that life and art are an adventure. Each step reveals something extraordinary, which the artist is able to notice and show to the viewer, via formal transformations, the poetic charm of a seemingly banal reality. Apart from videos he makes installations and art books and is a curator. He has the rare ability to combine technical expertise with sophisticated concepts; his works sparkle with humour and refreshing anarchism while at the same time open up a vast space for contemplation.
Grzegorz Drozd is one of the most original representatives of Polish art. On the one hand he is a painter who can paint anything; on the other hand he is a seditious scoffer and schemer. His works are crimes against art and its hierarchical institutions as well as an intellectual playgrounds for viewers. At the Samsung Art Masters competition, just like during his final exam, he blackmailed the respectable commissions, turning them into an object of a work, which was the very evaluation process. In this way his work turned into entertainment for other people.
The great advantage of Drozd’s approach is an absence of any wishy-washy metaphors or unclear messages known exclusively to the author. Nor is there place here for an expression of the artist’s mysterious inner self. On the contrary, he makes use of clear and precisely defined situations, where he introduces unexpected movement.
Konrad Smoleński is a multimedia artist, who expertly uses film, music, performance, and object. Irrespective of the chosen technique or a combination of them, the artist displays an above-average knowledge of the tricks of trade of each medium, an ability that has been known as artistry. Technical perfection of Smoleński’s works comes as a surprise taking into consideration the subjects he takes on and the conspicuous presence of the vibrant and openly anarchist personality of the author, who is not so much an implicit trace but the cornerstone of this oeuvre. Hypnotic movie stills and their virtuoso editing as well as soundtracks of powerful impact, painlessly introduce the viewer into an alternative field of perception, designed by Smoleński to ultimately destroy the viewer’s aesthetic bliss and confront him with the borderline experience of the brutally inevitable, such as decay or death. In spite of their uncompromising attitude, their display of ultimate subjects and a regular use of very intrusive forms, Smoleński’s works are balanced off by subtlety, wit and unbounded liberty. Kuba Bąk