Marek Sobczyk Marek Sobczyk. Twice Too Many Pictures [research on the Brain in Poland]

May 27, 2011 - September 17, 2011

Marek Sobczyk's painting is art at its most sublime. The artist, co-founder of the Warsaw Gruppa, the period's most important art group in Poland, has consistently addressed – in his art as well as theoretical reflection – the issues fundamental to painting, the picture, the artist, and society. Sobczyk deals with ontology, axiology, aesthetics, and metaphysics of art.

And he approaches them with responsibility and intellectual honesty. He is critical, ironic, and subversive; he creates pictures-hypotheses: complex and multi-layer but at the same time specific and universal. The artist's most recent project, whose part will be on view at the aTAK Gallery, is entitled Twice Too Many Pictures [research on the Brain in Poland] Two reflections inform this intriguing phrase and provide a unique insight into reality. The first one is an apparently obvious – although not always clearly formulated – observation concerning the character of contemporary visuality. The overflow of images. The world which supplies images in quantities and at the speed far exceeding human perceptual abilities. To Sobczyk, this process becomes the departure point for the great narrative of his art. The second issue, to which the title's bracketed part refers, concerns social contexts and questions about this particular locale, this country, this nation, this people and their spiritual condition. The probing of this trauma which is our sense of history and our understanding of the present.
Waldemar Baraniewski, exhibition's curator

"Brain's Research in Poland" also involves the probing of the space between the word and the image, the inner perceptual space which never manifests itself fully and consequently remains uncharted. This may concern my brain (the artist's brain), the Onet brain or the Polish brain in Poland (studying and being studied) as far as such generalisation is plausible.
Marek Sobczyk

Sensualism, historical sense and certain pessimism which is inextricably linked to them [...] have let Sobczyk develop an original form of vitalism: not vulgar but precise, almost scientific. [...] "Brain's Research" has elucidated Nietzsche's mysterious thesis that the philosopher is a sublime but so far imperfect being while the artist - although an essentially lower being – has managed to define himself more beautifully and splendidly.
Mateusz Falkowski

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue in Polish and English, designed by Marek Sobczyk, with essays by Waldemar Baraniewski, Marek Sobczyk, and Mateusz Falkowski.

View the embedded image gallery online at:
https://www.atak.art.pl/en/wystawy/archiwum/22-marek-sobczyk-dwa-razy-za-duzo-obrazow-badania-mozgu-w-polsce.html#sigProGalleriaf1a7cf2092

 

 

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