Artist’s statement displayed next to the work at the exhibition Refugia. Keep (out of) These Places:
“For a long time, I have been working directly in and with nature. Nature is not only an inspiration for my work, but also the material I use. My studio is always a place in nature, under the open sky, where I create, or where my paintings create themselves.
I created the painting Nienawiszcz I over the course of one year — from 3 September 2019 to 2 September 2020. I placed a 205 × 360 cm canvas primed in white in the beaver pond in Nienawiszcz. After one year, I recovered the finished painting — it had clearly marked water levels, which with time, went down significantly. I did not impregnate the painting nor varnished it, so that the smell of spending a year in water, silt, and sludge would be preserved. The painting witnessed went on in the pond throughout the year. I neither helped nor bothered this painting.”
O artystce
Fom 1973 to 1978, Piotr C. Kowalski, studied at the Faculty of Painting at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznań (currently known as the UAP). From 1993 to 1999, he was Dean of the Faculty of Visual Education (and since 1995, the Faculty of Artistic Education) at the State Higher School of Visual Arts (PWSSP) and later of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. In the years 1981–2001 he was a member of the Senate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań; he also ran the Painting Studio at his alma mater. He lives and works in Poznań and Nienawiszcze.
He is the author of a series of paintings created in nature entitled LIVING NATURE/LIVING LIFE?, including: delicious and unpalatable paintings; transitional, transitory, and fleeting paintings; borderline, frontier, and foreign paintings; polite and sinful or naughty paintings; paintings painted in sunshine, in shade, without shadow and without a shadow of a doubt; finished and unfinished paintings; paintings painted in shelters, paintings on track and paintings on track to go to hell; paintings painted on a high and low level (Giewont mountain and the Lubin Copper Mine)….
The artist’s works are held in several collections, including: National Museum, Poznań; Zachęta National Art Gallery, Warsaw; Drents Museum, Assen, the Netherlands; Arsenal Municipal Gallery, Poznań; Bielska Gallery, Bielsko-Biała; Szczecin Zachęta Contemporary Art Gallery; Mazovian Centre for Contemporary Art Elektrownia in Radom; Art Museum in Łódź, as well as private collections at home and abroad.
