Collection

The work is part of the Novus Ordo Seclorum project, an attempt at rewriting the history of the avant-garde. The artist deprives modernist art of its groundbreaking, revolutionary and scientific nature, embedding it in the history of magical rituals and introducing freemasonry and alchemy tropes. He further creates a kind of visual atlas comprising renderings of iconographic associations, his juxtapositions of individual motifs simultaneously erudite and absurd. Central components of the visual atlas include a symbolic map, depicting the history of the artistic proto-avant-garde in a labyrinthine garden form, its products permeating the space of a hallucinogenic landscape park. The central part of the land-art gallery is occupied by a constantly filling and emptying pool, its form emulating Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square as well as the print from the 1617 work Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica by Robert Fludd. The famous print depicts a black square inscribed with Et sic in infinitum, translatable as “And so on to infinity”.

Draughtsman, graphic artist, author of comic books and artbooks, creator of films and installations; curator. He studied graphic arts and intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. He combines art history research with artistic practice, questioning common beliefs and universally accepted facts. In his work he emphasises that ideas of modernism and the avant-garde were not as original as they were believed to be, but had appeared in previous centuries. The author of comic books produced in the form of essays, visual atlases, and the occasional graphic novel, he has been recognised for such works with the Grand Prix at the International Comic Book Festival in Łódź (2007) and the Grand Prix of the National Artbook and Art Album Competition (2011), among other awards. His project to analyse the symbolism of the canopy over the entrance to Józef Piłsudski’s burial crypt, developed jointly with the Institute of Architecture, represented Poland at the 14^th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014. Laureate of the Polityka Passport Award (2014). He lives and works in Kraków.