Marcin Maciejowski

Marcin Maciejowski was born in 1974 in Babice near Krakow, Poland where he lives and works. In 1996 he founded Grupa Ladnie with Rafal Bujnowski, Marek Firek, Wilhelm Sasnal, and Josef Tomczyk Kurosaw.

Maciejowski is a great observer of modern life. Re-fashioning the unspectacular, jocular and otherwise forgotten images of our time into realist paintings, he manages to decode and interpret the complexities of post-capitalist society’s medias whilst also playfully satirising the medium of paint itself. Described as a modern day allegorist, his paintings appropriate the ‘fast’ imagery associated with photography but pause the process of looking through the ‘slow’ analogue system of painting. He combines a crude flashiness reminiscent of comics with a meticulous technique, a mechanism that serves to undress the precocity of the European avant-garde and painting at large. Maciejowski doesn’t bore us with the usual tropes associated with the relevance of painting today, he is firmly aware of the legitimacy of other image producing mechanisms. Indeed the sources of his images – comics, posters, computer games, his own snapshots, the Internet – are all mediums that belittle the relevancy of the individual. Subsequently, Maciejowski highlights his own situation as an artist in the contemporary world and his relationship between his practice and other equally valid methods of image production. By thus believing in the ability of painting to reflect on other methods of depiction, he makes a virtue of the stillness of the medium itself.