Cezary Poniatowski
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2023
1987
Poland
Wschód
Cezary Poniatowski’s astonishing sculptures seemed like armor for a Giger dungeon, their mutated biomorphic forms and human body parts swaddled with pleathery padding. I felt unsafe. I could not tell who was behind me or around me. Dread and panic rollicked in like aftershocks from years before—like the reanimated jazz age revels in the shining, decadence and fun transmuted into something frightening by the passage of time - Nora n. Khan, Artforum (2022)
“I treat used furniture as a human’s soul negative. That’s what I want to pull out of them – the world under the surface as a pulsating, wriggling part of reality, sphere of repressed feelings, hidden emotions, undercover intentions”
"My work thus far encompasses characteristics of both painting and sculpture - of rough, handworked quality, interior and exterior forms, organic and synthetic materials - a game between light and shade. The artworks usually seem to be built from hand-assembled long-serving everyday items as I focus on exploring the area between craft, furniture and architecture. Although I work in various media, certain uncompromising exposure of structural nuances is ubiquitous across my projects. The content of the works is accessible through the pri ...
“He stuffs his works with foam used for soundproofing in communist social housing, shaping it into bulging, angular forms fastened to a board with screws and crudely secured staples. In so doing, Poniatowski also stuffs abstraction with the potential for meaning, tarnishing its formalist sanctity, getting under its skin.."— Camila Mchugh, Artforum (2020)
The darkness of Poniatowski’s visual universe seems to speak to the social upheavals wrought by the formerly socialist country’s economic transformation and the removal of state structures of support – a trauma that fuels the nation’s current culture wars, reflecting the political tensions between left-wing factions and the alt-right government - Moritz Scheper, Frieze (2020)
CEZARY PONIATOWSKI (b. 1987 in Olsztyn, Poland). Lives and works Warsaw, Poland. In 2012 graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw where he received his MFA.
Selected solo shows include Relief, Basilica di San Celso, Milan, IT; Vaults and Swellings, FUTURA – Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, CZ; Welcome to Itchy Truths, Stereo, Warsaw, PL; Hearth, Jan Kaps, Cologne, DE and Hereafter (with Sami Schlichting), Mélange, Cologne, DE.
Selected group shows include Metabolic Rift, Berlin Atonal, Berlin, DE; All Worlds Are Flat, Blindside, Melbourne, DE; The Spirit of Nature and Other Fairy Tales. 20 years of The ING Polish Art Foundation, Silesian Museum, Katowice, PL; Nosztrómo, Ashes/Ashes, New York, US; Waiting for Another Coming, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, PL; Doors of Paradise, Union Pacific, London, UK and FOAF Berlin (Friend of a Friend), ChertLüdde, Berlin, DE.