Robert Maciejuk, Appearance. Photo: Michał Grochowiak
Vases picks up where the book, published last year by Zamojski's Morava Publishing House, leaves off. Released as a limited edition run of just 200 copies, it's a tribute to the artist and his work outside of the comfort zone of painting
Robert Maciejuk is a painter who relies on his intuition to create works of art and who happily reaches for other forms of expression, unabashedly trying his hand at ceramics, even when his initial efforts prove just as trying for him as for other amateurs. And yet Zamojski has put the focus on his ceramic works, the vases that have become the protagonists of a meticulously hand-bound album of photographs of these very works. Yet it is not just about the ceramics, rather, it is a shift from painterly reproduction to the subject of many works of art of the past since Ancient Greece, up through the Dutch and Italian masters of the 17th century, the Colorists and the KP group of Polish artists in Paris of the 1920s for example, inspired by the forms and earth tones of pottery and ceramics. The photographs in the album document the classic forms and texture of these objects, their charm expressed in those few degrees shy of perfection.
The project is Maciejuk's effort to pay tribute to the artistic traditions he has inherited, looking another medium as a form of respite from painting, which, as he says, the more he learns about it, the more he doubts his skill. Yet his faith in the power of painting and other arts remains unshaken.
Robert Maciejuk (born 1965 in Biała Podlaska) studied painting at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts under Professors Stefan Gierowski and Ryszard Winiarski. In 2011 he received the Jan Cybis Award for excellence in art by the ZPAP Circle. From the beginning of his career, he drew his inspiration from architecture and form, in particular the architecture of the Renaissance and Alberti's Perspective Construction, geometry and proportion. He painted slightly surrealist, uninhabited spaces of monumental structures and mysterious planes.
The current show presents a series of drawings, paintings and ceramics by Robert Maciejuk, curated by Honza Zamojski. It runs at the Starter Gallery between the 15th of March through the 15th of April 2012.
Galeria Starter
ul. Gen. Andersa 13
00-159 Warszawa
www.starter.org.pl
Purchase the book at mottodistribution.com
Editor: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: Starter Gallery