Krzysztof Wojciechowski, Janusz Szczucki “Relations & Notices” 3.10 – 26.10.2002
October 3, 2002 10:00 pm Krzysztof Wojciechowski en Janusz Szczucki wonen en werken allebei in Polen en horen bij dezelfde generatie conceptuele fotografen. De tentoonstelling presenteert een selectie van nooit eerder in Nederland vertoonde werken van beide kunstenaars. |
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| Krzysztof P. Wojciechowski Born 1947, Warsaw, Poland Member of the Union of Polish Art Photographers 
Krzysztof Wojciechowski started with photography at the end of the 1960’s. In the early 1970’s he was connected with the “Remont” Gallery in Warsaw. His initial work was influenced by conceptual art (“Imperfectum”), but already his 1975 exhibition “Landscapes and Notes” showed more narrative tendencies. In the 1980’s, as many Polish artists, he was involved with the documentation of the reality of the Martial Law period, creating what could be one of the largest collections of photographs of political graffiti (“A Passer-by”). In the same period he also presented an important exhibition. “Children’s Play”, a serie of fifty photographs of his children. After 1990 he continued his work along two lines: the first one named by himself lyrical conceptualism (“Parabolae”), the other one being a kind of para-journalistic work, reflecting upon current political events (“Colors of War” – about the Kosovo war). The photographs of Krzystof Wojciechowski presented in the WM gallery are selected from two different projects: Parabolae(Parables) and Colours of War. They present two visually and conceptually different attitudes to photography. The first one consists of quite, metaphorical black and white series of pictures in which the artist tried to complement conceptual methods of constructing his works with references to evangelical stories or existential situations (Juda’s Silver Pieces was originated as a paraphrase of 1970 Michael Snow work Venetian Blind). The work Colours of War (A Certain Collection of Neck-Ties) was his response to the Kososvo war in 1999 and specifically to the way it was reported by the media. It consists of a serie of 14 pictures, all of them being photographs of TV screen, confronting the ever handsome and well dressed NATO spokesman with atrocities and absurdities of war. Selected individual exhibitions: 1970/1 “Our Exhibition of True-Bred Dogs” (with A.Jorczak and P.Lucki); WTF Warsaw (Poland) – Galeria Prezentacje, Torun (Poland) Bibliography: Fotografia 4/1970 & 10/1970, Warsaw Film: “Przechodzien” – directed by Alina Czerniakowska 9TVP 1990)
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Janusz Szczucki Born in 1953 in Bialystok Founder and manager of the Znak gallery in Bialystok from 1973 to 1982 Member of the Union of Polish Art PhotographersJanusz Szczucki’s former works were always caracterized by a certain restreint. The artist used to narrow his scope, minimize mutual existing relations within a single picture or even eliminate them by retaining only one element in each picture. Apparently it was caused by the strong emphasis he put on analysis of visual relations between photographed objects. He wanted to create laboratory-like conditions in order to scrutinize these relations, to make an attempt to abstract elementary relations that are not obstructed by the existential chaos. In the recent Multiple Perspective serie the artist employs – like he did before – sets of photographs forcing thus beholders to connect individual parts of such system, to decipher relations. The difference lies in the fact of breaking up, deconstructing a photographed object before assembling it anew. Photographing section after section a landscape which does not fit into one frame seems to be natural process (Relations – Landscapes, 1983), photographing in the same way a small thing that easily fits the frame is another thing. This time the artist makes a kind of dissection, which in a way is characteristic to photography, with the edge of the frame playing the role of scalpel.
In the serie Shadows Szczucki examines relations (apparently his favorite word) between an object and its shadow. Again there are juxtapositions of two separate pictures, the one of shadowless thing and the other of the shadow alone, not necessarily resembling the object of whose “soul” it supposed to be. The exhibition “Relations and Notices” in Gallery WM presents a selection of both above mentioned series Selected individual exhibitions: 1972 “Photography”; Klub Siedmiu, Bialystok (Poland) – Galeria Riviera, Warsaw (Poland) |
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Subtle but noticeable differences in perspective in which individual parts of the objects were photographed and incidental character of this method generate mysteriously vibrating and less ascetic results. The edges of pictures that do no match one to another are – to continue surgical parable – like turned out edges of a wound that have to be stitched together. It seems the artist wants to fulfil naively ever present photographer’s dream: to reach at least one millimeter under the surface of the superficial, using in a radical way this photographic scalpel to break desperately into the third dimension of a two-dimentional world.