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Kurak MaciejSince 1998, he has been associated with the Academy of Fine Arts, where he worked as an assistant in the studio of Professor Mirosław Pawłowski, where he worked with studio printmaking. In 2003 he was awarded a PhD title. Kurak’s works are frequently enormous in size and require significant resources, because he includes objects, internal elements or even entire buildings that we know from our everyday experiences in entirely new contexts. It the artist’s own words, his artistic strategy are somewhat like a DJ’s methods, based on mixing whole areas of ordinary life. As he says himself: “the most interesting for me are the kinds of activities that can effect the viewer, regardless of whether they are aware of the fact that they are looking at a work of art or not. Kurak transforms the gallery in order to best fulfil the demands of the visitor. He compacts them into much smaller dimensions (W skrócie [In short], Warsaw), creates secret spaces under their floors serving as resting spaces (Dekonstrukcja [Deconstruction], Łódź 2002), sets up hyper-realistic mannequins in them admiring nonexistent works (Passe-partout, Poznań, 2004), or packs the gallery with older people, making the supposed “exhibition” impossible to see (Pojedynek [the Duel], Poznań, 2005). In a similarly nonchalant style, Kurak appears in residential interiors, creating in them sterile, white spaces celebrating order and harmony (Sweet harmony, Poznań, 2004), submerges entire buildings under the surface of the earth, exposing only the satellite antennas on their rooftops (Symulacja autentyczności [Simulation of Authenticity] Zielona Góra, 2002) or constructs homes reminiscent of models of communist-era blocks of flats, but on the a scale of a single apartment (Puszczyka 20b, Warsaw, 2007). Kurak plays with the audience’s habitual behaviour, sometimes subjecting it to serious challenges. His most recent projects are based on transporting images and identities of places of the presentation of art works, entering into a dialogue with traditional “theory of place”, a subject breached years ago in the legendary Foksal gallery by the pioneers of Polish conceptual art. The work of the Poznań artist does not treat spaces of human activity as a single, canonised system. He set them against one another like dominoes, that can be arranged in any order, following only simple rules. IN 2005, Maciej Kurak received the top prize in the Spojrzenia contest, and in January of last year, he received the Paszport Polityki honour in the category of visual arts. |
Adin, dwa, tri Maciej Kurak and Max Skorwider’s realisation of Adin, dwa, tri reminds a huge abandoned television, left in the middle of Matejki Square, which played the programme of the once famous Russian psychotherapist, treating any physical diseases by hypnosis, Anatolij Kaszpirowski. The object was oversized, thankes to which it fulfiled all middle-class dreams of a great, enormous television standing in its honourable place in the living room. On its screen you could have seen only your own reflection, at the same time hearing words that are to treat the inhabitants of Krakow from any socio-political traumas recently taking place in Poland. The form of the television, as artists said, “is a reference to the nineties, when Kaszpirowski’s radio programmes attracted as many viewers in front of their televisions, as Majka, M jak miłość and Klan combined attract people today”. Picutre: Weronika Szmuc |
11 - 27/06/2010
Adin, dwa, tri
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