Underpaintings and art on the meters | Marek Firek

Artist

Marek Firek

ABOUT EXHIBITION

The exhibition of paintings by Marek Firek in Nova Gallery consists of over a dozen works from three series: pre-collections, underpainting and paintings per meters and one painting “gray”. The artist’s ability to create (and abandon) successive painting concepts as well as the laid-back “appointment” of new artistic trends is the result of his ironic and casual play with the notion of art, tradition and conventions. This is the first individual exhibition of the artist in Art Agenda Nova.
It can be watched until March 10.

Why do I show underpaintings, paintings on the meters, and old pictures at the exhibition, making this a retrospective?

The question I put in the title is symptomatic. This is not a traditional question: what did the artist want to say? I think that nowadays nobody is so interested in what the artist has to say. Art, as you know, is a commodity and both the artist and the intermediaries want to earn money from it. The answer is thus: I have painted pictures because I want to make money from it. I can explain why I painted it in a different way so that poor critics do not break their heads.

At the exhibition, I show a few pictures from ancient times that are examples of pre-communism. They were made around 1986, that is, during the reign of the darkness of the twentieth-century avant-garde (in contrast to the twenty-first-century artillery). New currents were flowing, the loading has come to a good place in art, so now I can display pictures from that time.

In 1995, together with my colleagues, we founded the famous Ładnie Group with Rafał Bujnowski, Marek Firek, ie me, Marcin Maciejowski, Wilhelm Sasnal and Józef Tomczyk-Kurosawa, as a manager. Therefore, the proper charge is a decade from around 1995 to around 2005. What after 2005 is post-modernism, will be followed by a reaction to charging, ie anti-power, and then it will be neo-modernism.

The second part of the exhibition – pictures per meter are, therefore, on the borderline of charge and post-cannivism, with their roots still in charge. Around 1994, I made the first series of identical acrylic pictures, based on graphics reflected in larger quantities. Their creation was related to the fact that at that time I was making paintings that represent the elevation of blocks (one picture is one elevation). Because I cut windows in the canvas, I received painted rectangles with which I did not know what to do. All you had to do was paint the same motif and create a series of the same pictures. This idea has evolved. In 2002, I developed this idea by making the same image in different size versions so that it could be bought by both a wealthy person and one with less money.

The third group of pictures are underpainting. These underpainting is nothing but underpainting. They can, however, exist as normal images when normal customers buy them. The target group, however, are rich artists from countries lying in the western reaches of Europe, who can buy them in order to later paint normal pictures on them. For an additional fee, I attach pictures of motifs that were the basis for the implementation of underpainting. I do not plan to sell undercoat for national artists for further use. It is about the considerations of promotion, advertising, as well as traditionally understood prestige. I think that underpainting is an example of post-classical art. The underpinniness of my underpainting is expressed in the fact that they are on the verge of representativeness and non-representation. Someone who does not know the starting motif will consider them abstract. Useful or any other justification for taking such pictures is extremely important.

At the exhibition there will be another picture that is over-painted, or rather over-painted. It is approaching the minimal art, and as this must be justified, the inspiration was to paint over the gray paint of my Car Gallery in the Tunnel in Ruszcza in Krakow. As you know, it is a gallery where everyone can do what he wants. I would be happy if it was a deliberate artistic activity of a certain group of Greeks, i.e. operating this very color. Of course, the explanations can be different