ABOUT EXHIBITION

Janusz Oskar Knorowski - "Baltic, birches, storks".

Opening: May 10, 2023, at 7 pm
The exhibition runs until June 24, 2023



BALTIC

The inner space of the painting, the rhythm, the color, the giving of a dominant thought to a single subject, is a brief characterization of the reasons for the creation of these paintings. They are the result of direct observation and transposition of the subject to avoid the banality of representation. Hence the frequent changes in form, the method of painterly writing. They are a collection of experiences, they contain a trace of human existence, breakwaters organizing space and composition. They also give unlimited possibilities for the creation of their surface from textural precision to expressive gesture and the play of painterly coincidences. Maintaining the same format provides an expositional opportunity to post-frame paintings with different intensities, spaces and contents of painterly means. The variable renewability and vitality of this subject is the atavistic saturation of painting.

BIRCHES

Birches is a cycle - a multiplication of one subject, occupying me for 27 years now. All the time I find and discover in painting this simple subject more and more new events. Although countable, they cause in painting them an almost fractal infinity. Once I pictorially define their structure, the tangibility of the matter, at other times I limit the representation to the valor and temperatures of gray, until complete graphization. The result is paintings that vary in format, building a relationship of space in the exhibition interiors, often creating a gallery space. The core of this series are images of birch trunks, single, as if cut out
from reality. Over the course of many years, several hundred of them were created. They have also been the compositional axis of many of my exhibitions. Importantly, they acquire multiple meanings and associations in the interpretations of viewers. Read, directly, as an element of the native landscape, but
symbolically. Franz Walter Schmidt, curator of my exhibitions in Germany, in his lectures gave historical significance to these images, recalling the insurgent crosses and the film "Birchwood." Birches also have a personal meaning in my life. I planted a small patch of land with small birch saplings in 1990. Now among the mature birch trees is my small summer studio.

STORKS

Lying down I watched the storks taxiing. The painting is a record of the rhythm of nature, without any interpretation. During an exhibition in Germany, "Storks" was interpreted as a protest against the attack on the World Trade Center. A greater absurdity was never heard again later. In Zurich, I learned that many Polish storks had settled in Switzerland. The war in the Balkans interrupted their flight path to Poland. "Storks" is a picture-stamp that I can repeat twice a year - in spring and at the end of summer.

- Janusz Oskar Knorowski


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