The exhibition includes the three eponymous spatial, painted objects and a video. This autonomous film narrative, which combines painting and performative interventions, is reminiscent of Roman Polanski's early student film Two Men and a Wardrobe from 1958. In his work, Gilewicz touches upon the value of both artistic and physical labour, and the roles of critics and art institutions. His work reveals the limits of artistic activities and the part they play in a wider social environment. According to Sara Reisman:
Wojciech Gilewicz's practice is about expanding the scope of painting specifically and art in general into the realm of daily life, usually public and sometimes private. Gilewicz questions the very nature of art, dismantling it from the rarified, official spaces of culture to a much wider field that leads to the discovery that life itself as art.
This exhibition marks the New York premiere of Gilewicz’ Cuboids video and the fourth presentation of the artist’s three painterly objects. It is accompanied by a catalogue published on the occasion of Gilewicz’s solo show Rockaway at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw.
This exhibition at Cuchifritos is the artist’s third solo show in the U.S., after Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis (2008) and Flux Factory in New York (2012).
Wojciech Gilewicz
Wojciech Gilewicz is a painter, photographer, and video artist. He was born in 1974 and today divides his time between Warsaw and New York. Gilewicz's series of paintings and photographs are based on the principles of illusion, revealing the visual tricks and falsifications inherent in the visual arts.
From the very beginning of his career, both photography and painting have been almost equally important for Gilewicz. Even his graduation project at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1999 was accompanied by a photographic appendix.
He often casts himself as subject, taking a variety of roles that challenge preconceived notions of who he is, as a man coming from Poland in the 21st century's global society. As Gilewicz himself explains his approach to his art:
For some years now I have been trying to combine painting with photography by making paintings in which the two techniques supplement each other. The split second of taking a photographic picture of a fragment of nature is then translated into weeks and months of making a painting', adding, 'The finite painting is described by photographic images documenting the consecutive stages of its making.
Gilewicz has gained recognition for the photographic series he started in 2002 and continued ever since. Each of the works is a photographic self-portrait. Gilewicz uses double exposure to photograph himself twice in the same setting in a single film frame. In some of these portraits he looks like a pair of twins, in others he makes sure the two figures each have a distinguishing feature, e.g. the haircut. Some of the pictures in the series present situations that are ordinary, common, everyday. Others surprise viewers with their slightly uncanny atmosphere or sexual undertones, forcing them to think about the protagonists' ambivalent sexual identity.