Untitled (Piotr Uklański, Marek Konieczny, Cezary Bodzianowski, Monika Szwajewska)
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- Untitled (Piotr Uklański, Marek Konieczny, Cezary Bodzianowski, Monika Szwajewska)
- 1991-2009
- 2 color photographs, diptych, each 20 x 30 cm
- 30 × 20 cm
“While studying at the Art Academy in Warsaw in the 1990s, I had the great fortune to be a student of Marek Konieczny and Zbigniew Warpechowski. On the recommendation of these artists, I later befriended Paweł Freisler in Malmö and Krzysztof Zarębski in New York—both artists offered their patronage and advice to me during my coming-of-age as an artist. All four of these seminal figures not only influenced my artistic language but were also instrumental in shaping my identity.” So acknowledged Piotr Uklański his formative experience of encountering these four significant figures in his introduction to the book “Polish Art of the 70s.”¹
At Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts, Konieczny ran a studio as guest professor between March 1989 and February 1990. His brief stint at the academy overlapped with a period of fundamental change in Poland—from actually existing socialism to democracy and market economy—which culminated in the first free parliamentary elections held between June 4 and 18, 1989. In 1991, during a visit in Warsaw after he had already left Poland for New York, Uklański met Konieczny; his partner, art historian and critic Monika Szwajewska; and his fellow student, the artist Cezary Bodzianowski (who was soon to leave the country too, for Belgium) at the studio of a photographer friend of Konieczny. Together, they had a picture taken to commemorate the meeting, which might have been the last before the young artists left for faraway lands. The commissioned image is carefully staged, with a variety of models’ poses and their distinctive, impressive and yet unpretentious attire. The 1991 analogue photograph resembles a portrait of friends—or perhaps two sons with their bohemian parents—and a sense of familiarity between the protagonists can be felt, while each of the four embodies a different persona. Konieczny, standing, wears a formal dark suit decorated with the Star of Think Crazy—an emblem of “Think Crazy,” his ongoing artistic practice proclaiming an unconventional attitude—on a blue sash, his signature pink-gold jester’s horn attached to the forehead of his shaven head; Konieczny would wear it occasionally, to provoke his interlocutors in private and public situations. Uklański, a youthful face with some stubble on the chin and blonde cherub hair, is seated, in a white shirt with sleeves rolled up to his forearms, wearing a pink kontush sash—a type of elaborately embroidered silk belt originating in Persia, adopted by Polish gentry from the seventeenth century on. Worn as a shawl, it becomes an emblem of nonchalant nobility. Bodzianowski, half kneeling and sporting a light brown corduroy jacket with a ceramic bowtie and pocket square, holds a ceramic figurine of an ermine on his arm (invoking a painterly emblem—the animal is represented in a c. 1489–1491 portrait of Cecilia Gallerani by Leonardo Da Vinci, known as “Lady with an Ermine,” which is held in the collection of The Czartoryski Princes Museum – National Museum in Krakow), examining the viewer with cold stare from behind vintage eyeglasses. Szwajewska, reclined at the three men’s feet, staring straight into the camera from under the visor of her elegant black leather aviator cap, wears black shoes and black stockings, and a brooch on her black dress.. She is, perhaps, a figure of an anticipated mourning—yet not without irony. A readymade studio backdrop, imitating cloudy blue-green-red skies, or perhaps the northern lights, lends an eerie feeling to the scene.
The photograph was first forgotten, until Konieczny used it for his own work, on a postcard he printed around 1993, adding a title “Associated Professor” (that is, professor in company, implicated in a situation). Uklański reappropriated it and added a second picture of the same protagonists eighteen years later, arranged in the same order (though now with a touch of disorder, and taken casually with an iPhone). Double-dated 1991–2009, Uklański’s work is a diptych—think of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience,” or paintings of the “stages of life”—picturing the states of human beings when the journey begins and when it comes to an end. The prodigal sons returned from their odysseys—or maybe just visiting. Here is Uklański half kneeling, his upturned gaze almost repentant, with one bare foot visible and a fake skeleton hand with one finger broken (recalling the fork’s broken tine in “Untitled (Wars I)” sticking out from the sleeve of his jacket, pressed to his chest. Bodzianowski, standing, in sandals and a button-down black shirt open to display his chest and belly, with a red rag draped over his left arm, looks down on a golden hand—a Chinese-made, decorative object from a contemporary bazaar—held in his own. Konieczny, in the centre, standing askew on slightly bended knees, holds a similar golden hand while awkwardly grabbing his pink shirt. Szwajewska, reclining on the floor in front of the men with a blue feather fan in her hand, wears a semi-transparent, embroidered flesh-coloured blouse with fake pink rose brooch, a black dress and silver block-heel shoes. All four are slightly dishevelled, aged, obviously not as confident as in the first photograph, on the edge of losing control of themselves—but never losing control of the image. The background is a relief made of interlocked pieces of veneered wood, stuck on an oriental patterned carpet; a work by Konieczny, Jean Arp made domestic, or “thought crazy.”
In 2018, Monika Szwajewska passed away. Marek Konieczny died four years later. Thus, Uklański’s photographic diptych has entered the realm of “coffin portraits”—a specifically Polish sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century genre of realistic effigies of deceased noblemen and noblewomen, painted on hexagonal or octagonal sheets of metal to be affixed to the narrow end of the coffin during funeral rites, then removed and hung on walls of churches, which the nobility supported. Avantgarde and mortality are just one breath away. A.S.
1
Łukasz Ronduda, “Polish Art of the 70s,” editorial concept by Piotr Uklański (Jelenia Góra: Polski Western; Warsaw: Center for Contemporary Art – Ujazdowski Castle, 2009), p. 5.
At Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts, Konieczny ran a studio as guest professor between March 1989 and February 1990. His brief stint at the academy overlapped with a period of fundamental change in Poland—from actually existing socialism to democracy and market economy—which culminated in the first free parliamentary elections held between June 4 and 18, 1989. In 1991, during a visit in Warsaw after he had already left Poland for New York, Uklański met Konieczny; his partner, art historian and critic Monika Szwajewska; and his fellow student, the artist Cezary Bodzianowski (who was soon to leave the country too, for Belgium) at the studio of a photographer friend of Konieczny. Together, they had a picture taken to commemorate the meeting, which might have been the last before the young artists left for faraway lands. The commissioned image is carefully staged, with a variety of models’ poses and their distinctive, impressive and yet unpretentious attire. The 1991 analogue photograph resembles a portrait of friends—or perhaps two sons with their bohemian parents—and a sense of familiarity between the protagonists can be felt, while each of the four embodies a different persona. Konieczny, standing, wears a formal dark suit decorated with the Star of Think Crazy—an emblem of “Think Crazy,” his ongoing artistic practice proclaiming an unconventional attitude—on a blue sash, his signature pink-gold jester’s horn attached to the forehead of his shaven head; Konieczny would wear it occasionally, to provoke his interlocutors in private and public situations. Uklański, a youthful face with some stubble on the chin and blonde cherub hair, is seated, in a white shirt with sleeves rolled up to his forearms, wearing a pink kontush sash—a type of elaborately embroidered silk belt originating in Persia, adopted by Polish gentry from the seventeenth century on. Worn as a shawl, it becomes an emblem of nonchalant nobility. Bodzianowski, half kneeling and sporting a light brown corduroy jacket with a ceramic bowtie and pocket square, holds a ceramic figurine of an ermine on his arm (invoking a painterly emblem—the animal is represented in a c. 1489–1491 portrait of Cecilia Gallerani by Leonardo Da Vinci, known as “Lady with an Ermine,” which is held in the collection of The Czartoryski Princes Museum – National Museum in Krakow), examining the viewer with cold stare from behind vintage eyeglasses. Szwajewska, reclined at the three men’s feet, staring straight into the camera from under the visor of her elegant black leather aviator cap, wears black shoes and black stockings, and a brooch on her black dress.. She is, perhaps, a figure of an anticipated mourning—yet not without irony. A readymade studio backdrop, imitating cloudy blue-green-red skies, or perhaps the northern lights, lends an eerie feeling to the scene.
The photograph was first forgotten, until Konieczny used it for his own work, on a postcard he printed around 1993, adding a title “Associated Professor” (that is, professor in company, implicated in a situation). Uklański reappropriated it and added a second picture of the same protagonists eighteen years later, arranged in the same order (though now with a touch of disorder, and taken casually with an iPhone). Double-dated 1991–2009, Uklański’s work is a diptych—think of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience,” or paintings of the “stages of life”—picturing the states of human beings when the journey begins and when it comes to an end. The prodigal sons returned from their odysseys—or maybe just visiting. Here is Uklański half kneeling, his upturned gaze almost repentant, with one bare foot visible and a fake skeleton hand with one finger broken (recalling the fork’s broken tine in “Untitled (Wars I)” sticking out from the sleeve of his jacket, pressed to his chest. Bodzianowski, standing, in sandals and a button-down black shirt open to display his chest and belly, with a red rag draped over his left arm, looks down on a golden hand—a Chinese-made, decorative object from a contemporary bazaar—held in his own. Konieczny, in the centre, standing askew on slightly bended knees, holds a similar golden hand while awkwardly grabbing his pink shirt. Szwajewska, reclining on the floor in front of the men with a blue feather fan in her hand, wears a semi-transparent, embroidered flesh-coloured blouse with fake pink rose brooch, a black dress and silver block-heel shoes. All four are slightly dishevelled, aged, obviously not as confident as in the first photograph, on the edge of losing control of themselves—but never losing control of the image. The background is a relief made of interlocked pieces of veneered wood, stuck on an oriental patterned carpet; a work by Konieczny, Jean Arp made domestic, or “thought crazy.”
In 2018, Monika Szwajewska passed away. Marek Konieczny died four years later. Thus, Uklański’s photographic diptych has entered the realm of “coffin portraits”—a specifically Polish sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century genre of realistic effigies of deceased noblemen and noblewomen, painted on hexagonal or octagonal sheets of metal to be affixed to the narrow end of the coffin during funeral rites, then removed and hung on walls of churches, which the nobility supported. Avantgarde and mortality are just one breath away. A.S.
1
Łukasz Ronduda, “Polish Art of the 70s,” editorial concept by Piotr Uklański (Jelenia Góra: Polski Western; Warsaw: Center for Contemporary Art – Ujazdowski Castle, 2009), p. 5.