Opening Hours
Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm
Gallery
Art Agenda Nova
Batorego 2, Krakow
Artist
Marcin Mroczkowski
ABOUT EXHIBITION
The exhibition of works by Marcin Mroczkowski consists of paintings from the years 2003-2004, constituting fragments of various cycles, herds, both their form and content, is not a coherent whole, which can be seen already in the title of the exhibition itself. He also talks a lot about the artist’s work method of composing elements on canvas, a kind of compilation. The artist does not try to reduce, if he simplifies it, he does not use any scheme. The paintings are full of complicated texture, amount of detail, but have nothing to do with the painting of matter. It is a subject painting, and the complex form is the result of the assembly of individual components on the canvas, not a value in itself. Before, Mroczkowski created extensive compositions using polyurethane, plasticine, often on atypical sub-images. While building compositions, he used paper clippings that resembled collage technique. His paintings were filled with human crowd-watched by the artist on the street, on the beach, dozens of figures forming a busy whirlpool. Normal urban scenes took place on the canvases – traffic jams, traffic at intersections, car races of cars – both those painted and glued, cut from colorful magazines – dominated. Mroczkowski’s method is simple, but subtle, borrowings from ordinary, easily perceptible but not populist reality, because only the subjective emotion, the reaction – often the disagreement with the surrounding reality – influences the choice of subjects by the painter.
The exhibition can be viewed in the nova gallery until June 3
„Painting and assembly” – commentary to the exhibition
Somewhere around a little and even earlier, I fell into fascination with fold-out cribs for the holidays. These were gadgets made of one part of the cardboard, properly cut, so that after bending out of an incomprehensible set of figures and drawings, a scene was created that depicted God’s Birth. At the same time, the crib spread out the buildings, the donkeys, the three kings – magic. Some of my colleagues were getting books from abroad, in this way they were made with melodies. My sister and I prepared such scenes and then also performances, for example, on the motifs „Przygód Małpki Fiki-Miki” – here the matter was that there was a jungle with lianas, after which the monkey jumped. It was really nice.
Today is nice too. I wake up in the morning and eat breakfast, then get on the tram, go to the workplace and go there for a few hours doing different activities. The activity of my company is understandable to me, but the meaning of my activities after years spent here ceases to be tangible to me. The goods in which I participate are intended for a broad, abstract community for me, for a mass of people I do not know. The reality in which I find myself ceases to be coherent, homogeneous, or at least I am a breach in it (it begins to make sense when I take a payment and go shopping – then I find my identity lost again)
Contact with reality is mediated, second-hand. By participating in the production system, I touch a small fragment of it, and the information about reality is obtained sifted and processed, simplified and etomatised. The image of the world that is created in the mind is heterogeneous, fragmented. As a participant in this conveyor, I remain an integral part of it, feeling at the same time the alienation and unavailability of its true nature.
Some of the paintings I have painted over the last year are an attempt to connect these two realities, or maybe an attempt to describe the world in which I live, using the means that I used as a child. I am thinking here, for example, about the characters that I make from plasticine and put in previously painted paintings.
I separate individual elements of the presented world. Although they remain in the common context of space and situation, they are divided by the distance of quality and matter, they come from other fragments of reality. They are close together and distant at the same time. By resorting to this surgery, I try to express the inevitability of the situation in which we are, because I am a fatalist.
A certain group among the presented at the exhibition are images from Disneyland, they are a complement to the previously mentioned. Here I tried to portray a situation in which different realities are mixed up, decorations become a part of the landscape. This is an extraordinary situation when a fairy tale or fairy tale is so literally absorbed by our space, production space and big money. But Mickey Mouse has money, because he is from America …
Jolanta Gumula
www.artinfo.pl
Works of artists presented at exhibitions in galleries usually come from one cycle, hence they are generally homogeneous. The spectators who are used to this will not find uniformity in the painting of Marcin Mroczkowski, which is currently presented at the Cracow gallery Nova.
Although Mroczkowski’s paintings come from recent years (2003-2004), they are fragments of various cycles. The first commentary that follows after a careful look at it is a great diversity. There are works kept in a dark, monochromatic tone, vivid, in even-handed colors, a smooth and complicated texture, almost three-dimensional, almost relief. The subject (if it should be said here) is fairy tale, war, moral, abstract. Once we see whirlpools hurrying people somewhere, sometimes a battle scenario and figures on trenches, another – the contours of cubes suspended in perspective.
You can look at Mroczkowski’s paintings for a long time, because you can see a lot in them. Such observation becomes after a while absorbing fun in the search for non-standard materials that the artist uses to paint images.
They are a bit like a collage technique. Mroczkowski has already created extensive compositions using polyurethane, plasticine, newspaper clippings. He often uses atypical sub-images, and all materials say a lot about his method of work and workshop. Despite this complex texture and richness of detail, the paintings have nothing to do with the painting of matter. „It’s subject painting, and the form is the result of assembling individual components on the canvas, not the value in itself” – a commentary to the exhibition.
In this vortex of colors, paints, plasticine, we find, among others dozens of characters on the street, beach. The usual urban scenes are playing – street traffic jams, traffic at intersections, speeding cars – painted and glued in plasticine or paper.
Images are only seemingly complicated. In fact, Mroczkowski’s method is simple, although subtle. Borrowings from reality are easily perceptible, quite ordinary. The subjective emotion of the painter obviously has an influence on the choice of subjects.
The whole – both form and content – also reflects the reality, or rather its duality, which is best commented on by the artist himself:
„The image of the world that is created in the mind is heterogeneous, fragmented. As a participant in this conveyor, I remain an integral part of it, feeling at the same time the alienation and unavailability of its true nature.
Some of the paintings I have painted over the last year are an attempt to connect these two realities, or maybe an attempt to describe the world in which I live, using the means that I used as a child. I am thinking here, for example, about the characters that I make from plasticine I put in previously painted paintings.
I separate individual elements of the presented world. Although they remain in the common context of space and situation, they are divided by the distance of quality and matter, they come from other fragments of reality. They are close together and distant at the same time. By resorting to this, I try to express the inevitability of the situation in which we are, because I am a fatalist. ”