Michał Martychowiec – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

Michał Martychowiec 

• (born 1987) – creates series of photographs, videos, drawings and multimedia installations. His artistic endeavours are inspired by his interest in old art and in the philosophy and aesthetics of the Far East. His projection installations are usually closely connected with the place they are done in, which creates a whole new conceptual and artistic context every time. One of his most recent projects in March 2013 was carried out in a hot spring bath in Ko-So-Yu in Kaga, Japan. Another one, from 2010, was set in an ice storage facility in Venice. He graduated from the prestigious Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. His graduation work  in 2011 and it was “Vanito Vanitas”, a multimedia project, which was both a reference to the 17th c. vanitas paintings and a dialogue with the 20th c. abstract art. By eliminating the vanitas motifs and replacing them with simple geometric shapes, the artist completely altered the primary semantic layer of selected paintings, while simultaneously revealing his fascination with minimalist art, in particular with the abstract paintings by Kazimir Malevich and his iconic square. The aesthetically minimalistic series of photographs, which he has been doing since 2009, comprise another important aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. They are based on his studies of the philosophy and aesthetics of the Far East. The “Destination: The Magic Mountain” and “Heavenly Coppice” series comprised a contemporary journey signposted by images remembered from the childhood, which the author commented on with a quote from Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straight-forward pathway had been lost. "The Beginning, the End”, however, is a series of cyanotypes and drawings relating to the reflections of the philosopher Lao Tzu’s on these two inseparable notions. Another interesting facet of his work comprises his documentary projects, in which the author creates his own narrative by photographing selected fragments of other artists' works and using them as a basis for a mosaic of new contexts. The first such project was carried out on the "Awake and Dream" exhibition in Palazzo Dona in Venice, and subsequently shown in the main programme of the Art and Documentation Festival (Łódź 2010). Another one consisted in a video recording of an acoustic performance of Pierro Motola, an Italian artist, in Venice in 2011.
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• “Pavilion 0”(Palazzo Dona, Signum Foundation, Venice, 2013),
• “In Memory”, a site-specific installation, Ko-So-Yu, Yamashiro Onsen, Kaga, Japan, 
• “Future Landscape” (Forte Marghera-Parco del Contemporaneo, Venice, 2012),
• ”Blue, Red, Green” ( gift_Lab, Tokio, 2011),
• ”Drawing connection” (Siena Art Institute, Siena, 2011),
• “Nel mezzo del camin” (book launch, galleria upp, Venice),
• “Stone in Water”, a site-specific installation, (Palazzo Rizzo Patarol, Venice),
• “Destination” (galleria upp, Venice),
• “Vanito Vanitas” (Arts Forum, Media Centre Gallery, Brighton, 2010),
• “The theory of vision: A repetition” (Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, 2011), 
• “Awake and Dream” (Palazzo Dona, Signum Foundation, Venice, 2009).