Viewing Room

Wednesday, 04 September 2024

Paweł Ksiażek

Paweł Ksiażek

Composition 02 (Susanne), 2021
Oil on canvas
160 x 150 cm

Paweł Książek’s main medium is painting, though he can be easily called an interdisciplinary artist. His interests lie in the roots of modernism. On the basis of archival photographs and film, Książek finds common motifs for seemingly disparate themes, which he in turn connects in a collage-like-way on canvas.

Książek's series Movement is dedicated to the development of experimental dance in the Weimar Republic. The starting point for this series are two preserved photographs of the Viennese dancer Susanne Birkmeyer taken by Trude (Gertrude) Fleischmann in the 1930s in Vienna. The artist's conceptual large-format oil paintings are centered around the idea of showing the impression of movement. He uses the fragmentary afterimage, based on Władysław Strzemiński’s "Theory of Vision" rather than the linear overlapping of sequences. Książek’s challenge is to recreate these dancers’ movements from performances that were frozen in time by only a few limited historical photographs.

To see more works from this series, please click here.