Parallels

In his painting series Parallels, Paweł Książek investigates the mutual relations between the human body and objects in space, nature and culture, construction and destruction. Taking the work of Lygia Clark and her famed 1960s sculpture series Bichos (Creatures) as his starting point, the artist focuses our attention on the ties between the process of creating art and the emergence of various phenomena in the natural world. In doing so, he develops issues signaled in previous works, Sculptures (2012-2015) and Figures (2013-2015). In both of these series, the painterly apprehension of objects and body parts, portraits of women and mannequins, depicts an alternate world between reality and the cinematic fiction, in which objects acquire a peculiar physicality, and human figures gain sculptural qualities.

Parallels is a synthesis and montage, a parallel narrative and play on the depicted structure and the abstract. This is a new area of exploration in Książek’s work, involving a dual transformation: the object into a subject and the subject into an object.