May 17, 2013 - July 29, 2013
Peripheries is the title of the exhibition featuring Łukasz Korolkiewicz's paintings produced in recent years. Periphery is located close to the boundary defining some area, removed from its centre and consequently peripheries of any kind somehow seem less important, fading into insignificance, not calling for attention...
The artist has intended the title to illuminate his approach: he regards his art as essentially 'peripheral' as it concerns the private sphere, largely autobiographical.
Korolkiewicz's attentive gaze freezes within the frame of picture these visual aspects of reality which seem rather uninteresting and commonplace and occasionally even embarrassing in their plainness and lowliness. His brush renders such motifs unexpectedly expressive and the eye is charmed by their purely painterly magic. Underlain by ambiguity and frozen on the edge between reality and imagination, Korolkiewicz's vision makes the evoked images unsettling. They appeal to the subconscious, to the hidden, to our own psychological peripheries.
The exhibition features paintings produced after 2000, mostly from the period of 2009-2013. The painter's favourite leitmotifs appear in new variants: the scenery of "secret garden" in the backyard of some dilapidated townhouse and the neglected park with a pond, the old-fashioned interior in which various surprising objects, worn-off toys and dusty mirrors enter into secret interactions with one another and with the invisible director of these ironic and poetic spectacles – the artist himself.
For years, Korolkiewicz's painting has been powered by two intertwining currents: one ironic with the elements of absurd and grotesque, the other nostalgic and melancholic. They are not so dramatically opposite as it may seem at first glance. They are but two aspects of the painter's very personal record of 'essential reality.'
Kinga Kawalerowicz - curator
Media patronage: