Piotr Uklański: a short bio
Uklański is a Polish artist born in 1968 in Warsaw, and now living in New York. He graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. He uses various media - from photography, installations, through to video and performance art to wage an ironic, critical war using the alluring charm of stereotypes in popular culture and visual clichés.
The New York Times' Roberta Smith has described his approach to art as a "wily combination of seriousness and black humor, sincerity and cynicism". He takes material for his works from degraded areas of pop culture, showing their unquestionable magic. His works speak just as much of spontaneous joy in the face of beauty as they do of a sense of guilt which emerges from its experience.
Uklański's "speciality" is transporting different aesthetic phenomena over space and time. His Dance Floor project from 1996 is a floor "quoted" from a nightclub, pulsating with light to the rhythm of dance music. Installed inside a gallery, it becomes an element visitors cannot pass by. Uklański's exhibition The Nazis, shown at Warsaw's Zachęta gallery in November 2000, ended in scandal; several works were destroyed and the exhibition was closed down. The project comprised a series of 164 color photographs of well-known foreign and Polish actors who had played Nazis in films. Using a tool typical of mass culture, the artist collated the film portrayals of the "evil German" which haunt audience's collective imagination. The photos show handsome, elegant men, film tough guys seducing the viewer with their attractive image, thus blurring the truth about Nazism.