„Three Conversations”. Exhibition of the works of Konrad Jarodzki and Pawel Jarodzki.

Presented at the Academy Salon Gallery, the first exhibition by Paweł and Konrad Jarodzki juxtaposes the work of the two prominent Wrocław artists. „Three Conversations” is an intergenerational dialogue about the body and eroticism, about war and death. It is also an intelligent diagnosis of contemporary times, full of anxiety but not devoid of humour. The exhibition consists of almost 130 paintings, drawings, objects and stencils.

As curator Marek Śnieciński writes: 'arranging an exhibition which will bring together the works of Konrad and Paweł Jarodzki is not an easy undertaking. The two artists had a lot in common, but also just as much in common. They belonged to two different generations, and so – for obvious reasons – each of them had to mark the boundaries of their contemporaneity in a different way, each pointing to a different artistic and cultural area, which was their identity reference point.

At the same time, they fundamentally differed in their creative temperaments, had a different attitude to the broadly understood question of image and depiction, and yet they met many times, dialogically or polemically, both in art and in life”.

What united them, apart from their close relationship, was their creative attitude – in their works they both commented on the reality around them, both the material one, available in everyday sensual experience, and the cultural one, manifested in artistic phenomena, intellectual polemics or ideological manipulations.

They were both, therefore, diagnosticians of a kind of contemporaneity; for both of them, the ethical dimension of creativity was also extremely important. At the same time, they were far from artistic or „priestly” gestures and attitudes – they were not interested in the romantic myth of the artist, but were rather interested in a Beuysian attitude in which the artist is a man aware of the fact that his various activities are an integral part of life – they are phenomena included in the fabric of everyday life.

Both were aware that the world becomes as it is (if only for a time), as our narratives about it create it, as we are able to imagine it in our stories. Storytelling about the world is an ancient domain of art.

At the centre of Konrad Jarodzki’s art was the human being functioning in the midst of various existential temptations and dangers, as well as the related issue of space and its metamorphoses, which the artist treated both as a physical fact, as a plastic material, and as an existential, identity experience.

At the centre of Paweł Jarodzki’s art was a man attacked by various cultural phenomena, lost in them and finding his way. A man immersed in the manipulations of the culture of spectacle, trying to define his place in the labyrinths of social space.