Łukasz Korolkiewicz ‘Prof. K.’s Experiment’. Exhibition at the Czapski Palace | Salon Akademii gallery

Łukasz Korolkiewicz’s oeuvre belongs to the main current of contemporary Polish painting – and has already passed into the position of a classic. The artist is regarded as a representative of symbolic realism and new figuration, as well as hyperrealism, which, however, he does not treat too literally, enhancing the pictorial, rather than photographic, expression of his paintings.

He himself readily refers to the painters of Polish Modernism: Jacek Malczewski, Józef Mehoffer, Władysław Podkowiński and Witold Wojtkiewicz. Critics point to: Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, Arnold Böcklin, James McNeill Whistler or Edgar Degas. The paintings of David Hockney are also an important reference. Prof. K.’s style is complemented by irony and the grotesque, he reveals a penchant for the absurd; in my opinion, he travesties the peculiar “work” that is life.

In this edition, life is the sum of elementary snapshot situations, epidermal impressions on which a whole structure full of its various contents is superstructed. It is a large, self-perpetuating register of photographic frames – born every minute, pinned to memories and daydreams.

Everyday life, which fills the infinity of time, seems shallow, shallow and insipid – but not to Korolkiewicz. Each of his paintings, in one way or another, speaks of the everyday. It turns out to be a reserve of unhurried adventures. Would anyone in an average, rather civilised, bourgeois existence miss the experience of a walk in the park, a rustic holiday, lounging on the sofa, and peeping at their neighbours, in which an element of excitement or incredulity is revealed? Not likely.

It is not uncommon for each of us to marvel at the brilliance of water or the virtuosity of light as if it were something supernatural. In the search for the meaning of existence, one seeks to solve the riddle of one’s own shadow, seeking understanding with one’s own mirror image, probing the alter ego. Such experiences are what everyday life offers. There is no need to order it, to look for it, to buy it expensively. There is only one condition for accessibility: everything must be contemplated.

Korolkiewicz’s paintings seem to be realms of existential anxiety, trembling senses – something is lurking in them, hanging in the air, a threat. Above all, what is shadowy in the everyday is revealed, at the same time impenetrable, unpredictable, intangible, illusory. In the arcades of life, the meanderings of fate, ruthless biologism and sin can be perceived. And in full sunlight, the mysteries become even more airtight and alluring. This play is softly blended with life, albeit eschatologically laden. Tanatos does not let himself be forgotten, but death is present as a hard suggestion, a persecutory symbol rather than an eyewitness event. Korolkiewicz avoids cathartic dramaturgy and does not evoke drastic events.

This painting is populated – equally – by protagonists and artefacts. The plethora of the former includes: the artist (in act or disrobe), his wife, friends, acquaintances, children, especially girls, dogs, cats. The artefacts are: half-dead, battered, including decapitated, dolls – and their very articulate heads; literary or legendary figures and those painterly quoted by Korolkiewicz from other works of art. Some props behave haughtily like precious artefacts.

Details – scenographic, costume design, poses, gestures, trivial actions and some something, one does not know what – lead the way, they are like elementary particles, the alphabet from which the text of life is composed. The artist is interested in children’s toys and games for adults, which are as obsessive about adulthood as adulthood is obsessive about children. He is interested in the innocence and boldness of hallucinatory child play.

The artist’s preferred places of action are mysterious, most beautiful, coquettish parks, gardens, groves inviting some kind of initiation; deceptively (or not) paradisiacal. Claustrophobic, urban (shadowy and dirty) courtyards with their nooks and crannies, backyards-studded with patches of light and furnished with dumpsters with their unwanted and sticky secrets. Artistic and bourgeois interiors, as Krakow-like as they are, full of objects reflected in glass and mirrors. In fact, they are ready-made stage sets. The impression created in this art is of a limited, dense space, with great symbolic depth, almost a soul. And time is counted by the number of puffs of exhaled cigarette smoke – it cools down in an episode.

Łukasz Korolkiewicz’s art is a long-standing treatise on being among people – the concrete ones, not the generalised ones. About being side by side and together, about being yourself and being an artist. About alienation from one’s self and being rooted in one’s self, about the need for openness and concealment, defence mechanisms, the pretence of things and the art of pretending. The art expresses an atmosphere – enigmatic, dreamy, dreamlike, decadent, obsessive. Crucially, it reflects and metaphorises life, which is a game, marked by variables in the form of shadows and reflections, conventionality and uncertainty. The art of living is the art of seeing things in this game.

What we see is one thing, what we read in the titles is another. In both the one and the other, the literariness of this play can offer the viewer much. In the layer of titles, Korolkiewicz is a souffler of meanings for the images. Like a philosopher-optician, he explores the existential nature of light, the accommodation of the eye, the ability to see, the exercise of different perspectives. The light – and the procedures that it employs – can be seen as a theme in itself.

The oldest painting by Łukasz Korolkiewicz shown in the exhibition spaces of the Czapski Palace was created in 1982 (‘Apathy’), and from then on subsequent creative decades are represented here, but most of the fifty works are relatively new, and the latest one is from this year (‘Tiring Sleep’).

The exhibition ‘Prof. K.’s Experiment’ was not intended to be museum-historical – the basic criterion for the selection of works was therefore not the time of their creation, and the aim was not to define through examples the course of this art as a whole or to show only a certain period. Obviously – and naturally – Korolkiewicz, who is still creating, is keen to present what he has been up to at the moment, what he is like recently; hence this proportion of dating. However, the relationship the painter has with his paintings today, and in particular the need to spread a certain spectrum of impressions before the viewer, turned out to be crucial to the choice made.

The canvas ‘Simulacrum’ (1999), with its title, hints at one of the interpretative paths relevant to this art. ‘Interior with a black bird’ (2019) will draw the viewer into a different situation than the one invited by “Man in a black powder coat” (2021). ‘House of the Hanged Man’ (2020) by Korolkiewicz will evoke the memory of Paul Cézanne’s “House of the Hanged Man” (1873), which was exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition, while a certain “Impressionist” (2015) will hang in the Academy Salon. The audience’s reaction to ‘The Threat’ (1987) will ease before ‘A Beautiful Day’ (2017). Everything will be overseen by Korolkiewicz himself, gazing vigilantly from numerous self-portraits at his artistic experiment with the viewer.

This exhibition – in its diversity – confirms both the stylistic recognisability and thematic specificity of this work. Representing one of the many possible configurations of paintings – selected from more than 500 painted and available today in various types of collections and collections – it forms an original relief, a variation on its own theme. It offers the viewer a special adventure with painting. It invites the viewer to empathise and interpret subjectively – without obligation. Prof. K.’s “Experiment” is likely to surprise many viewers.

Łukasz Korolkiewicz – painter – born in 1948 in Warsaw. In the years 1965-1971 studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, graduating from the painting atelier of Prof. Stefan Gierowski. Since 1980, lecturer at his alma mater, since 1996 he has been running his own painting studio at the Faculty of Design with the title of full professor.

Scholarship holder of the US Information Agency (1986), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (1986/1987) and the Kosciuszko Foundation (1990). Winner of the Award of the Independent Culture Committee of the Solidarity Trade Union (1983) and the Jan Cybis Award (1991).

His works can be found in the collections of the National Museum in Warsaw, the National Museum in Cracow, the National Museum in Poznań, the Museum of Art in Łódź, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art and in private collections in Poland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, USA, France, Canada and Great Britain.