Paweł Łubkowski – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

There have never been and will never be two identical people in the world. But, for all our diversity and uniqueness, there is one thing that we all have in common – the way.

Paweł Łubkowski asks us to accept the challenge of entering the space that he arranges for us and fills with contents, symbols, and impressions that resonate with him most closely. Even though it is his personal vision, inspired by his own experience, it has a lot of potential to be universal for each one of us. It ultimately depends on ourselves whether we enter it out of curiosity, to find out about its meanders and paths, whether we accept the consequences of a decision to continue, to keep searching, or to stay in a place that we deem satisfactory, where we find a part of ourselves. On the successive stages of this way, we may at one time feel calm and safe, while at another we may experience a sense of unease about the baggage of meanings that the space offers, about what we encounter in it. The way that Łubkowski invites us to travel gives us a chance to self-reflect, to face our own choices, but also to experience, with consideration, the time devoted to travelling it. For time too is an important element of the experience brought forth by the artist. Time and its passage, human transience, and a confrontation of this process with growing youth. An ambiguous struggle between the young and new and the old. The mission to tend for the growth of the new, its beauty and freshness contrasting with, but also emphasizing, the noble symptoms of age and wear. What we see in Łubkowski’s works is a quest for a balance between drawing on the past and an inner necessity to follow one’s own path.

Łubkowski’s work is complex. There is a riddle in it and a task, a reflection on the masters of contemporary art, a respect for the aesthetic dimension of art, but also a trope of conceptual investigations. His art is a challenge, simultaneously disquieting and offering consolation. It introduces us to the artist’s emotions, but also provides ample opportunity to examine ourselves in them and to discover, or work out, our own unique experiences.

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• Curator
  • Krystyna Różańska-Gorgolewska
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Paweł Łubkowski

a painter, photographer, author of objects and installations. He studied painting in the Department of the Arts of the Institute of Visual Arts of the University of Zielona Góra (2004–2009) and Digital Image Creative Processing at the Pedagogical University in Cracow (2013–2014). In his work, Łubkowski draws on his own memory and on post-memory. He searches for the traces we leave, which testify to our presence. These then become the subject of his works or their material. He combines the accompanying existential reflections with aesthetical considerations, producing etudes on life, transience, beauty,and art. Paweł Łubkowski has had nine solo shows and participated in several dozen group exhibitions. He was also listed in a ranking of 100 most interesting young Polish artists, compiled by the leading galleries.He currently lives in Cracow, but also retains a connection with the Lublin region, where he often produces his projects.