On 12 January, the walls of the exhibition rooms in Wrocław City Gallery will fill with Marian Waldemar Kuczma’s paintings, multi-layered both in their content and form. All paintings on display were created over the last few years.
Even though it is difficult to confine Marian Waldemar Kuczma’s paintings to representational art, the artist refuses to call himself an abstractionist. It is so because each of his paintings has a specific point of reference derived directly from visible reality. Kuczma’s main source of inspiration is the landscape, or more precisely, its fragments abstracted from their spatial context. Often overlooked and rejected, these can be the remains of ruined buildings, forlorn chapels or illegible remains of inscriptions on walls. And though Kuczma’s artworks do not copy nature in a mimetic way, by incorporating pieces of utterly banal matter into the canvases, such as pieces of wood, ceramic or sheet metal brought from specific places, his paintings become a reflection of the real world. It is all immersed in the icon – that is the aura of spirituality, which is the artist’s other great inspiration besides landscape.
In his paintings, the artist, who comes from the Bieszczady Mountains but lives in Wrocław, somehow balances at the intersection of two cultures. His art knits Eastern spirituality with Western intellectualism not only in the area of narrative and points of reference chosen by the author, but also on the technological level. As Aleksander Jasiński writes in his text, Waldemar Kuczma’s works are full of blurred borders – borders between the remains of a natural landscape and traces of human activity, as well as borders between the sacred and the profane, whose vagueness is highlighted by the multi-layered, palimpsest-like character of the painter’s works.
Join us at the opening on 11 January (Thursday) at 6:00 PM.
The opening will be accompanied by a piano concert by Tomasz Kaczmarek.
The exhibition is on display until 13 February 2024.
Curator: Katarzyna Zahorska