Overview
Drawing on art history, contemporary media and popular culture alike, Polish artist Marcin Maciejowski crafts an iconography fit for the cyber-reality of the twenty-first century. Uniquely attuned to how modern technology constantly reshapes ways of seeing, Maciejowski immortalises fleeting snapshots of daily digital life in his signature realist style. In one masterfully framed painting, the artist portrays a brightly clad female figure taking a mirror selfie in a nondescript bathroom, which, as the work’s title reveals, is located in the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Kraków. In another, he depicts a screenshot-like close-up of an instantly recognisable YouTube documentary on Jean-Michel Basquiat, homing in on the artist’s hand wielding a paintbrush as well as the video’s 265 likes.
Drawing on art history, contemporary media and popular culture alike, Polish artist Marcin Maciejowski crafts an iconography fit for the cyber-reality of the twenty-first century. Uniquely attuned to how modern technology constantly reshapes ways of seeing, Maciejowski immortalises fleeting snapshots of daily digital life in his signature realist style. In one masterfully framed painting, the artist portrays a brightly clad female figure taking a mirror selfie in a nondescript bathroom, which, as the work’s title reveals, is located in the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Kraków. In another, he depicts a screenshot-like close-up of an instantly recognisable YouTube documentary on Jean-Michel Basquiat, homing in on the artist’s hand wielding a paintbrush as well as the video’s 265 likes.
Maciejowski’s reflexive work grapples with the mediation of art not only by the digital realm but also by rampant capitalism, as epitomised by his painting of a wide-eyed Sharon Stone gesturing towards Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition (1919–20) in the background – the avant-garde artist’s first-ever painting offered at auction, as the comic-like caption elucidates. The radical nature of Malevich’s non-objective painting is supplanted by the sensationalisation of the art market and its intersection with celebrity consumer culture. Ranging from a scopophilic still from a 1960s Polish film to a sellotaped portrait of his wife as Jan van Eyck, this body of work reveals both the breadth and depth of Maciejowski’s painterly universe.
I am rooted in the here and now.
I comment on our times, customs, values and the culture of the 20th and 21st century.
— Marcin Maciejowski
