In 2007 at the Photography Festival in Poznań, the artist presented The Best of the Rest, a slideshow musically accompanied by Metallica. Images found on the internet were to give their best in the categories of absurdity, curiosity, protruding the standard norms.
Maurycy Gomulicki, King Spring - from the Pink Not Dead! exhibit, Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, 2006, Rafał Nowak / courtesy of the artist
Working in two cities on the Mexican-American border - San Diego and Tijuana – within the InSite project, Gomulicki completed his project Air Bridge (2003-2005). He included aeroclubs from both locations, showing how passion can connect two units across borders.
Maurycy Gomulicki is also involved in graphics and design. In years 2004-2005, together withe architect Jorge Covarrubias and interior designer Salvador Quiroz, he worked on a new image for a Mexican sex-shop network (Erotika Sexshop). It was an attempt to revalue the formally neglected erotic area through extreme aesthetic action. In 2006 at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, along with his works (Pink Niagara and Concrete laces) Gomulicki presented a project Pink Not Dead!, with the participation of artists from Poland and Mexico. The guiding theme was the color pink, arousing different connotations in both countries.
In his projects the artist repeatedly refers to the post-People's Republic of Poland visual culture of Polish cities. During a solo exhibition at Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw (2007), Gomulicki presented his own photographs of the capital's reality confronted with the official image of the city- a black and white photo album of Warsaw from the late 60's by Edmund Kupiecki. At the end of 2007, Gomulicki published a book about Warsaw entitled W-wa consisting of materials from his photographic archive. In an interview upon the album's release Gomulicki stated:
I was interested in the issue of beauty that is totally in contempt, to which nobody pays attention. I don‘t care about what is obvious.
The matter of visual heritage returns in Gomulicki's other realizations. The exhibition Schism at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw in 2009, dedicated to the art of the 90's shows a special installation relating to the atmosphere and specificities of the previous decade.
In several subsequent projects and exhibitions, the artist developed his interest in fetishism and eroticism, like at an individual exhibition at the Leto gallery (Minimal Fetish, 2009). In a project which took place during the summer (2009) in one of Warsaw's allotments, he organized a performance The Caress of the Foams where a topless model effectuated joyous ablutions in a outdoor bathtub full of foam.
On the occasion of the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCAK) in Kraków, 2011, Gomulicki had a small solo exhibition presenting a series of photographs titled Bibliophilia. In the pictures very young models, dressed only in a bikini pose holding huge books against library shelves in the background. The fetishism devolved to... the books juxtaposed with a young female body.
Maurycy Gomulicki, Obelisk, 2010, sculpture, fiberglass, car paint, 3 m, Pasaż Kultury, Poznań, courtesy of the artist
Recently, Gomulicki increasingly carries out both ephemeral and permanent projects in public space. On Kępa Potocka in Warsaw he installed a cheerful, pink neon - a glass of bubbling soda. The 17-meter neon sign was not meant advertise anything other than the hedonistic pleasure of life (Lightspurt, 2009). When asked for a comment, Gomulicki declared:
I do not agree on the primacy of death over life and suffering over pleasure over. When looking into culture, it seems that tragedy stimulates us but happiness puts us to sleep. Even so, it's worth a try to change it.
In the same year at the House of Creative Work by Wigry Lake near Suwałki, Gomulicki revealed a huge Pearl - a symbol of desire and a symbol of purity. The Pearl is, according to his words, both sensual and pristine, combining sophistication and simplicity, vanity and glory.
The pink Obelisk erected at the market place in Poznań (2010) was an erotic counter-accent to the late medieval pillory. The artist explained:
We have two protagonists: a torture stake and the pink obelisk. Two phallic events of an entirely different purport are confronted. One is terrible, the other delightful. The brutality of a steel pin is contrasted with a mawkish sweetness of a rolled chess figure. Degradation verses efflorescence. The bygone versus modern.
Maurycy Gomulicki, Lightspurt, 2009, neon park installation, 17 m, Kępa Potocka Park, Warsaw, Anna-Maria Siwińska/courtesy of the artist
The fanciful, elliptical roof entrance of the Kielce City Hall was painted red by Gomulicki, turning it into the Red Wedge (2010) - a quote from a famous painting by El Lissitzky Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge was transferred into the reality of the city. In a department store Renoma in Wrocław, on the glass connecter between the new and old part of the building, Gomulicki built a Color Cube (2010) distilling from the neoplastic work of Piet Mondrian. This monumental establishment with simple, geometric divisions, filled with basic colors (yellow, red, blue) - precisely in Mondrian's style - is a like transferring the flat paintings of the Dutch abstractionist painter in a three-dimensional reality.
On the occasion of the Polish presidency in the European Union in the second half of 2011, Gomulicki participated within the Fossils and Gardens public space project in Brussels with his performative action Phantom: Romantic Post-Vandalism. He attempted to change an abandoned modernist building into a painting. By walking along the floors, the artist will knock out particular windows until the facade will look like a drawing composed of empty windows resembling computer pixels. The recorded on video performance is meant to function as an independent, integrated work of art.
Gomulicki’s interventions in urban space always result in intriguing solutions. In 2012 he created Totem- an installation for the Open’er festival in Poland. Its shape reminds one at the same time of a rocket, a chess figure or a stair stick. Gomulicki decided to use a very expressive color palette, he covers totem’s edges with yellow, green or pink, even further accentuating its geometrical shape. Gomulicki comments on this project:
Once again I bet on a hypercolor: vivid, attracting, alarming, disturbing, banal and unusual day glow(..) I hope that my Totem will introduce a sort of order to this vibrating, rocking space and will function as a point of reference; a visual reference, that people will set up meetings left or right from.
The same year he shocked Polish seaside audience by creating two buoys shaped like breasts; a project prepared for the ARTLOOP Sopot Festival. He entitled his installation Relax & Luxus, stressing the fact that they are to be seen both as a symbol of eroticism and of luxury. He sees breast as a capital in its own right, explaining:
Boobs have a tangible symbolic potential: they are not only an erotic lure, an attribute of one’s attractiveness, but also a special kind of luxury, and in some cases, even a capital. I wrote about it quite extensively in a manifesto accompanying this exhibition. The exhibition that I am a part of is a thematic project and I am attracted to an erotic aspect of resort reality, which, if not imperative for everyone, remains nevertheless its crucial element. I would like it to be a bow towards all the ladies with their low-cut dresses on cloudy days and at the same time a rather ostentatious farewell to the season. Fortunately, we have summer every year.
