Tomasz Ciecierski, “Abitare”, Witches’ Tower

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Documentation

ciecierski

Tomasz Ciecierski

Abitare
Witches’ Tower

April 17th – May 22nd, 2015

The exhibition presents the cycle of collages Abitare by Tomasz Ciecierski. The title of the project refers to the etymology of the Italian word ‘abitare’, what means ‘to live’, and at the same time refers to the name of the famous Italian art magazine devoted to architecture and interior design.

Tomasz Ciecierski was born in 1945 in Cracow. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He is a painter, author of drawings, collages and photographs. He got the diploma from Prof. Krystyna Łada-Studnicka studio in 1971. In the years 1972-1985 he was a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 1999 he was awarded with the Jan Cybis Prize for his artistic output. He collaborates with Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, Wetering Gallery in Amsterdam and Hans Strelow Gallery in Düsseldorf. He lives and works in Warsaw.

The artist’s creation is a reflection on the essence of painting. Some elements of drawing, printmaking and photography play an important part in his works, which he composes with his paintings. Departing from the traditional understanding of painting, he creates relief compositions through layering and overlapping separate pictures. Ciecierski’s painting, based on cycles, is a specific ‘treatise on painting’ which is an endless work, coming to being in the process of his life. Thus it becomes a proof of the organic relationship between him as a painter and painting as the indispensable substance of life. This permanent state causes that painting is not a tautology and only a consideration on the medial character of painting, but becomes a transformation of existence recorded in the ‘picture’. His reflection is based on the narration which contains some continuous considerations on the essence of painting. According to his understanding, the ideal medium of painting has to be continuously verified in order to be incessantly updated. For this reason the process of idealisation of painting and its demystification at the same time. Ciecierski says, “Simply, I want to paint, I want it to be about painting and the very process of painting, layering, overlapping, and that’s all. But I truly don’t see the final aim. I can’t see the point which I would reach and then die. For me it’s always indefinite; this is probably the reason why I still paint and come to the same thing from different sides”. Hence his cycles of works are commentaries to his own output, for example pictures overlapping pictures, pictures painted on reproductions of his own pictures, photographic recordings of his pictures and used paints, documentation of the sink where he washes his brushes, and various compositions of pictures, landscapes and photographs.