Man without properties | Tomasz Kowalski

Artist

Tomasz Kowalski

ABOUT EXHIBITION

Art Agenda Nova presents the works of a young artist, Tomasz Kowalski. The title of the exhibition “Man without properties” is the duplication of the name of one of the pictures depicting a portrait of a man made of insects. The presented works, constituting a review of the latest achievements of Kowalski, were selected by the author, according to the most interesting key, or those best correspondent with each other.

Paintings and works on the paper of the third year student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow draw attention to the background of works by other young painters, their distinctiveness, poetics and surreal character. The artist is extremely busy, creates spontaneously and restlessly. A well-read erudite, with extensive knowledge of not only fine arts but also music and literature, seeks inspiration in these areas, but appreciates the role of imagination. He perfectly knows the rules of the techniques he uses in his work, and concentrates mainly on oil painting and watercolors. It certainly escapes artificial pigeonholing, seeking new, the most adequate means of expression.

Kowalski’s work is best described by two words: “collision” and “obsession”. In his paintings, he combines symbols that are associated with delicacy, innocence, evoking feelings of pastoralism with often drastic attributes guiding aggressive behaviors. As he admits himself, in art he is inspired by: “dissonances, brutality in subtleties and vice versa, real and” unrealistic “situations. His paintings are full of wounded animals and children, shooting hunters, entangled in the situations of human figures or transposed portraits of horror. “I value art that I do not understand, besides the contextuality of the work, the content it carries.”

Enchanted, among others The naive work of “Sunday painters”, or the works of Dadaists and the painting of the Proto-Renaissance, being at the beginning of the road, is at the same time completely aware of its value and the legitimacy of the art it cultivates.