Piotr WACHOWSKI (b. 1976), Winter, 2018

oil, paper; 38.5 x 29 cm (light frame).
A painter of unfettered painterly fantasy and imagination. Strange things are happening in his latest paintings: mutant-wolves, in an enigmatic landscape, fight, like King-Kong in an interwar film about a monstrous ape, with incoming aeroplanes. Swamp goddesses of Venus ask for a kiss from the pilots... And before that, Hitler, Mickey Mouse or Andrew Lepper... pop culture icons and tabloid heroes, mosaic pictorial world view, colorful, visually appealing painting. But is it only that? In his latest exhibition, entitled "Clothed in Matter" (Very White Gallery, March 2019), Piotr Wachowski engages in a discourse on spirituality. For him, the material world with which we identify is a delusion, a dream, since our spirituality is not material. Perhaps this is where the elements of disintegration of matter clearly visible in Wachowski's recent paintings come from, although this disintegration and "blurring" of figures has been hinted at in his paintings before. Piotr Wachowski was born in Slupsk in 1976. He studied at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1996 to 2001, graduating with honors in Wieslaw Szamborski's studio. Since 2001, he has been working at the Faculty of Painting, first as an assistant to Miroslaw Duchowski, then to Pawel Boltryk, and currently as an assistant professor in Czeslaw Radzki's Drawing Studio. He is the author of many painting exhibitions. In 2002 he was nominated for the Passport of Polityka, and in 2003 he was awarded the prize of the quarterly magazine on contemporary art "Exit". He received a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in 2007. He holds a doctorate and is currently preparing to initiate his habilitation.