Bartosz Kokosiński - Crack

27. November  2014 - 31. January  2015

Knoll Gallery Budapest is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Bartosz Kokosiński. Kokosińksi, born 1984 studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. He lives and works in Warsaw.

Kokosiński belongs to that generation grown up in the digital age for which the free access to the globalized information flow and mobile communication is an implicitness. On contrary to his predecessors who still were shaped by the restrictions of the communist regime and who were shifted relatively sudden into a capitalist orientated market society after 1989, this transition doesn’t play a main role anymore for the younger generation of artists. Rather Kokosiński takes up global topics and movements which he depicts in his extensive paintings in an abstract manner or by implementing daily objects. He refers playfully and ironically to different genres of painting such as still life, assemblage, landscape painting, Arte povera or Minimal Art and transforms them in seemingly autonomous objects by bent stretchers and burst canvases. 

In his series „Paintings devouring Reality“ the canvases devour their environment. Kokosiński muffles different situations, surroundings or conditions with the canvas, but still allows reality to push through. The panel acts protective, euphemistic and stifling at once. In „Painting devouring my studio“ Kokosiński used working materials and useless items of his studio. It functions like a portrait of his working area and profession and let us think about the conditions of making art or the status of the artist. „Painting devouring a rural landscape“ shows a beforehand idyllic rural scene now squeezed and disrupted in the canvas. The imaginable ideal  of a beautiful landscape with nice one-family-houses has been overtaken by something. The dream of a good or better life has been smothered by a superior, invisible power. A metaphor for the numerous excesses of our globalized economies which enter our private sphere unasked. In his „devouring series“ Kokosiński represents processes and objects from everyday life, whereas in his abstract works he deals with the modalities of painting as such. One can say that in latter works, the uncontrollable, inner essence of painting appears. Similar to an organic process the works crack from the inside, arch into the space, show their different layers or produce chapped surfaces. They convolve, contract, burst. Kokosiński addresses painting as a metamorphic process which questions the genesis and evolution of the medium critically and expands its boarders into the space. On several levels Kokosiński plays with our systematics and transforms those procedures in formally, aesthetically and contentwise matured three-dimensional objects. Behind that approach one can find the frequently asked question about what painting is supposed to depict in a powerfully pictorial world that is driven by continuous visual input. Kokosińskis hybrid works between painting and object can be seen as one possible answer.