Grzegorz Hańderek / Bad Dream

Grzegorz Hańderek
Bad Dream

Exhibition:
8.4 – 26.6.2016

Opening:
7.4.2016, 5 p.m.
Witches’ Tower, Słupsk / al. F. Nullo 8 / Słupsk
(photo report / Adam Mroczek)

documentation
Grzegorz Hańderek

 

Bad Dream or the Power of Interpretation

A dream cannot be pinned up. By nature it is something liquid, and each passing image is subject to continuous metamorphosis, because it happens just in time, not in space.
Jean Genet, Funeral Rites

In the overwhelming majority of Grzegorz Hańderek’s works, which he presented to the public over the past decade, we were able to unquestionably get used to the characteristic of the artist’s aesthetics, games and anthropology of quasi-urban places. Exhibition strategies which he uses and the nature of his visual forms and territories have become a kind of trademark and leitmotif throughout the artist’s work. You can even say that actually we are accustomed to the simulacrum world of scaled ‘architecture’, in which human presence is absent. However, in his the latest project Hańderek goes beyond graphic arts and clearly reveals new traces and clues, and – what’s more – surprises us with his entire discourse of visuality. Emotiveness areas that lead slightly across his ascetic and structural geometry are moving and amazing. These new concepts and affects allow us to ascertain human existence not only in the dimension of allegorical figures flashing in between the afterimages and phantasms of the artist. For, as he admits, they are abandoned emotions that once were located in an equally abandoned house plants. It is worth noting that we can find such plant ornaments in the older – definitely more classic – graphic cycles by Grzegorz Hańderek, where this ecosystem existed spontaneously and did not need man at all. It was a – you say – a post- apocalyptic world, perhaps inspired by futurological narratives and anticipations, whose sources lie in literature or sociology.

At the exhibition Bad Dream the genealogy draws its toxic sap out of existence which – as the author explains – “we have the right to be afraid of”, and – what’s more – “is going to hurt us”, for “any other day will be shorter than the longest day of the year”. We are in front of fear and a looped time which once used to be “pushed forward linearly”, and today – as suggested by Zygmunt Bauman – “it has not its own direction”. Our uncertainty which concerns, inter alia, suspension or (im)possible communication is the more reinforced by fears generated by the ambiguity and instability of the social reality in which we live. Hańderek focuses primarily on a single and atomized existence which is presented from the perspective of permeating heresies of wakefulness and dream. In this case these components – although structural and archetypal for humans in general – are filtered through the individual biography. His expressionistic bio and minimalistic, almost monochromatic graphy constitute topographic coordinates in the archipelago of the Bad Dream in which the viewer can feel somewhat like in a dreamy tale, full of tricks and delusion. However, because this dream does not belong to the order of the virtual world, and its ‘meatiness’ and ‘bloodstream’ are apparently assigned to a specific history and a particular body, it reveals – as any ancient drama – its cathartic potential. An image, as Geoffrey Hartman claimed, is like a dream; “it is not holy, but the power of its interpretation really is”. Therefore, Handerek’s project can be placed in the field of psychoanalysis, image and epitaph…

Roman Lewandowski

 

Grzegorz Hańderek was born in 1977 in Zabrze. He is a graduate of the Art Institute in Cieszyn, University of Silesia in Katowice, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice (diploma with honours in 2003 at Prof. Jan Szmatloch gravure studio). In 2005 he completed the Ph.D. in the discipline of graphic arts, obtaining the doctoral degree in 2011; since then he has been running the studio of literature interpretation at the faculty of the arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice; in the years 2006-2013 he worked at the State Higher Vocational School in Racibórz, teaching drawing and graphics; in 2008-2012 he was the dean of the faculty of arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice; and since 2012 he has been the vice-rector for student affairs at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice.

Selected solo exhibitions:
The Other Way, Cracow, 2004; Posters Club Fanaberia, Bytom, 2005; Metropolises/Necropolises; Landscapes of Memory, Museum of Contemporary Art, Minsk, Belarus, 2007.

Selected group exhibitions:
Fax Art – Life and Peace, Ogaki Poster Museum, Japan, 2002; 5th Polish Print Triennial, Katowice, 2003; 13th International Print Biennial, Varna, Bulgaria, 2005; International Poster Triennial, Toyama, Japan in 2006; International Poster Biennial, Lahti, Finland, 2007.

Awards: the First Prize at the 3rd Paweł Steller International Print Contest, woodcut and linocut bookplates, Library of Silesia, Katowice, 2002; second prize and silver medal at Satyrykon, Legnica, 2006; Grand Prix of the 6th Polish Print Triennial, Katowice 2006.