Dominik Lejman works in the same manner as a magician does when daring us to see the invisible. The raw material for his work ranges from the obvious to the everyday life patterns we so readily take for granted. Lejman doesn’t use any tricks or sleight of hand to make his point. Instead, he opens our imagination as if it was indeed our eyes, helping us find new ways to interpret the world we move in. He has built his career around questioning the parameters of the media he is working in. Since his graduation as a painter from the Royal College of Art in London in 1995, Lejman has been one of the leading artists of his generation to challenge and create a new medium: he began to mix the discipline of painting with his video recordings to introduce a new dialogue in how to perceive. This merging provokes and confronts our prejudices of what we think a painting should be in the same manner as the Suprematists did in using collage as a technique to defy the boundaries of their generation’s assumptions of what a painting was. Lejman’s ventures into these new avenues of expression were unique at this time as he was using painting more as a conceptual tool than as an object confined by its discipline.
Lejman uses the means of the act of making to open a conversation on where a painting can go by challenging its validity as an art form. His videos entrap moments in time — space differentials. He creates a new forum for dialogue by intertwining the projected images with the painted surface of the canvas so that they may act as a vehicle for his ideas. Dominik Lejman’s works create their own somnambulistic language, a conceptual dream-walk through a non-definable space.
Dominik Lejman (*1969 in Gdańsk, Poland) is a multimedia concept artist. He lives and works in Poznań and Berlin. Lejman has been exhibiting
in numerous international shows, including Macht! Licht!, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2022), Sanguine/Bloedrood, Prada Foundation, Milano (2018), Still/Motion,
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2008), Polish Pavilion at the
9th Biennale di Venezia of Architecture (2004), 1st Prague Biennale
(2003), and After the Wall,
Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1999) /Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2000). In
2018, he received the prestigious prize of the Akademie der Künste in
Berlin for redefining the medium of painting.