Collection

Painter. A graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he studied in Prof. Leon Tarasewicz’s studio, he identified with the “worn out by reality” scene, a movement born in the early 2000s including artists employing a surrealist poetics in their work. Śliwiński approaches his paintings as a palimpsest, applying one layer, detail and background after another until a satisfactory composition is created. He lives and works in Warsaw.

Paweł Śliwiński frequently leaves things to chance, making no attempt to control the way paint drips off the brush. When creating works organic or animalistic in nature, he seeks inspiration in old biology albums, as in this work, a rendition of disturbing underwater creatures. In a slight gesture of placing two perpendicular lines on canvas, the artist trapped ocean-dwelling predatory fish behind an aquarium wall.

Paweł Śliwiński conjures up worlds of amazing intensity and beauty. Choosing the classical theme of a landscape, he engages in dialogue with art history and alludes to assorted styles and directions in Polish painting of the second half of the 20^th century. Undulating organic forms emerge from under visible brush strokes and colour stains varying in intensity, triggering associations with nature following her own rules. The landscape also features traces of nature from the artist’s own homeland, the Polish-Ukrainian borderland.