Piotr Uklański’s “Untitled (Pink Placenta)” 2009 via Gagosian
The Gagosian Gallery will be presents Piotr Uklański’s first solo exhibition in London since 1998 entitled “Brut.” The title of the exhibition refers to the term art brut, conceived by artist Jean Dubuffet in 1945 and roughly translates as “rough” or “crude” art. The show, which opened June 11th, debuts contemporary mediums of work envisioned by Uklański’s interest in a certain set of European aesthetics and politics from the post-war era. The exhibition runs through July 31, 2009.
Related Links:
Piotr Uklański “Brut” [Gagosian Gallery]
Piotr Uklański’s “Untitled (Lava)” 2009 via Gagosian
More pictures and text after the jump…
Installation view of Piotr Uklański’s “Brut” via Gagosian
Piotr Uklański was born in 1968 in Warsaw, Poland where he eventually studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. He then studied photography at the Cooper Union School for Advancement of Science and Art in New York. During the mid-90’s the artist emerged in the New York scene with his symbolic piece, “Untitled (Dance Floor)”-“a sculpture that integrates the legacy of minimalism with the blurring of art and entertainment that characterizes the current era”. Piotr Uklański divides his time between New York and his home in Warsaw and has created varied bodies of work using the whole spectrum of mediums from sculpture, photography and collage to performance art and films. His work, which does not shy away from contraversial subjects, has caused protests (such as photographic series “Untitled (The Nazis)”) and has been showcased internationally (from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to Centre Pompidou in Paris).
Piotr Uklański’s “Untitled (Monster)” 2009 via Gagosian
The pieces presented in “Brut” herald the political opposition to the upper class bourgeois by the art brut. Among display are “Untitled (Pink Placenta)” and “Untitled (Lava)”, both collaged of burned hand-made paper, as well as “Untitled (Crack)” and a new three dimensional “woven fiber” painting, “Untitled (Monster)”. These works, which combine diverse materials, are labor-intensive and replicate French 1950’s “matièrisme and tkanina artystyczna” (Polish Textile Art). They also include intuitive but artificial materials, like resin, which contemporaneously correspond to an art brut aesthetic and give voice to Uklański’s attraction to power and politics in a post-war Europe.
Piotr Uklański’s “Untitled (Crack)” 2009 via Gagosian
