Jarosław Kozłowski in front of the "Cistern of Time" exhibition, CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw, photo: Andrzej Rybczyński/PAP
As one of the most outstanding contemporary Polish artists, long affiliated with the conceptual movement, Kozłowski has been exhibiting since 1967. His work consists chiefly of installations that incorporate media such as drawing, light, sound, photography and objects. He is also an author of art books, as well as working in photography, drawing, painting and performance pieces.
Kozłowski's rich and multifaceted work has its roots in conceptualism. It is marked by a critical-analytical discourse with art and the mechanisms of perception, self-reflection and the building of correlations between the grammar of the artistic language and the sphere of meaning. In the 1970s the artist created works of a purely linguistic nature; they reflected his interest in language games and puns, as well as in transposing the rules of formal logic to reality and vice versa. The pieces he created during this period included Modal Drawings, Semiotics Exercises, Metaphysics, Physics, Ics and Exercises in Aesthetics or Exercises in Ethics. In Art Mythologies, a sizeable series of works from the 1980s, Kozłowski deconstructed various art-related myths such as the myth of the artist and of artistic freedom, the myth of originality, the myth of value and unselfishness, and so on. They were chiefly installation pieces, most incorporating sound, which were aesthetically attractive and intellectually enticing. But at the same time they exposed themselves unabashedly to the viewer, as the artist laid bare the falseness contained in them. These pieces were cathartic, helping the viewer to shed any misconceptions about the social function of art and of the artist himself.
In another series, titled Art Realities, Kozłowski used irony to disposed of entrenched mental patterns and conventions that persist among the art audience. He insisted that art should not be used instrumentally by the viewers, who usually expect it to provide aesthetic sensations or consolation, or who want to perceive it as an instrument of pleasure. Kozłowski treats art idealistically, as a sphere of freedom unbound by convention and unlimited by any attempt to achieve specific goals. He is an artist who is highly wary of representation and who relativises the dominant criteria, adopting instead the principle that meaning is dependent on context.
