The Olympus Myths in the Face of Contemporary Days / Krzysztof Skarbek

The Olympus Myths in the Face of Contemporary Days / Krzysztof Skarbek / 04.11.2021 - 09.12.2021

On 4 November, The City Gallery in Wrocław opens Krzysztof Skarbek’s exhibition entitled The Olympus Myths in the Face of Contemporary Days. The display includes painting, photography, installations and video.

In his artistic explorations Krzysztof Skarbek moves boldly not only across time and space, but also across real and imagined worlds. On his canvases, medieval knights, dinosaurs, cartoon characters, animals, pop culture icons, products of modern technology, aliens and cyborgs exist on equal terms. With each painting cycle, however, the artist expands his own imaginarium, incorporating new motifs and characters into his fantasy universes.

Krzysztof Skarbek’s latest painting series entitled The Olympus Myths in the Face of Contemporary Days refers to the culture of ancient Greece and Rome. This is how the artist talks about his most recent artistic explorations: This exhibition focuses on reminding the glorious history of Europe’s ancient beginnings. The popular and fascinating myths from Olympus present in my paintings are to show their relationships with elements of contemporary civilisation from a new perspective.

By presenting on his canvases Greek gods and Roman warriors coexisting in perfect harmony with robots and spaceships, Skarbek thus perversely points to the integrity of these distant worlds. He stresses that both contemporaneity and our ideas of the future derive directly from the past, while all fantasies about tomorrow are determined by our historical and cultural heritage. Referring to both idealised and dystopian visions of the future, the artist tries to cool down our unrestrained optimism on the one hand, and on the other to neutralise our fears.

He succeeds by using humour, expressed in gentle irony and sympathetic grotesque. Skarbek describes this aspect of his art by stating: An important element of my creative strategy is a sense of humour, which relieves the repeatedly pompous face of the subject of the gods ruling Greek Olympus. The disarming essence of irony is to point to the hidden, often grotesque, dramatic meanings of the depicted phenomena.

The exhibition is curated by Katarzyna Zahorska.

The Olympus Myths in the Face of Contemporary Days exhibition runs until 9 December 2021