Mikołaj Sobczak

He is a visual artist who revises myth-making narratives in his work. He reaches back to the past in his paintings, videos and performances to tell the story of an overlooked part of history, as well as of current topics related to politics and society, including, above all, the issue of the non-normative, the excluded and the condemned on various levels, among them on that of identity.

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Mikołaj Sobczak, photo: Maciej Landsberg

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Mikołaj Sobczak was born on 21 November 1989 in Poznań. He received his master’s degree in 2016 at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in Miroslaw Bałka’s Studio of Spatial Activities. His graduation film, Burza i gorące pragnienia (Storm and Ardent Desires) was based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Urfaust, the first version of Faust. Sobczak was also a scholarship student at the Universität der Künste in Berlin (2014–15), then he continued his studies at the Aernout Mik Film Studio at the Kunstakademie Münster in Germany (graduated in 2019). From 2021 to 2023, he was a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam and participated in the six-month residency program Art Explora – Cité internationale des arts in Paris (2023).

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‘The Smiths’ by Mikołaj Sobczak, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 124.5 × 165 cm, photo: Fundacja Sztuki Polskiej ING

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His artistic means of expression are primarily painting, video and performance. He also uses other techniques, such as ceramics and installations. He is inspired in his works by the memory politics that shape society’s consciousness, often mythologizing the past and manipulating the processes of storytelling. He looks at how these politics affect the fate of marginalized social groups, hence the protagonists of Sobczak’s works are characters from different eras that are forgotten or intentionally omitted from historical discourse. In his works, the artist portrays cultural, social, religious and sexual minorities in order to abolish the binarity of seeing historical processes, presenting them rather in a non-linear way and showing how the past influences the present – if only through the genes of our ancestors in our DNA. While he is committed to expanding grand historical narratives, he also reaches out to fictional sources: fairy tales and myths.

In his paintings, Sobczak alludes to the tradition of historical painting, seemingly already forgotten in contemporary art. He plays with this convention – his paintings are narrative, full of symbolism and metaphors, often drawing on camp style. His most common technique is watercolour and gouache, and he also uses collage in his works. These means of expression allow him to draw the attention of viewers to a variety of means of storytelling, to focus their attention on the narration. Sobczak also often reaches for unconventional solutions, as exemplified by works in the Metamorfozy (Metamorphoses, 2021) series, which he painted on plywood cut into various shapes. This form has become characteristic of his subsequent work, making it possible for him to create two-sided pieces and to set them amidst the exhibition space like sculptures.

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‘STAR’ by Mikołaj Sobczak, 2017–18, video frame, photo: courtesy of artist

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One of the most important painting series in Sobczak’s oeuvre is STAR from 2017, depicting the history of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries movement founded in 1970 in New York City by transgender activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. The works, created in watercolour and gouache, depict important moments from the STAR movement’s activity and portraits of its female activists. In his characteristic style, however, Sobczak blurs the boundaries of history and geography, weaving into one narrative the elements of others. For example, a portrait of Ewa Hołuszko, a transgender Solidarity activist, can be found among the works in this series – in this way Sobczak forces the viewer to look at history more broadly, pointing out the tension between the universality of certain models of oppression, resistance or revolutionary gesture and their locality. Images from the STAR series served Sobczak as storyboards for a film having the same title. The motif of drag queens often recurs in Sobczak’s work. He sees them as an example of a minority within a minority, marginalized doubly: both by the general public and by a queer minority concerned that the very distinct otherness of drag queens hinders the struggle for tolerance.

Sobczak’s first solo exhibition outside Poland was Leibeigene (Ger. Serfs). It took place at the Kunsthalle Münster in 2022, and its theme was historical painting – in a subversive, rebellious, non-obvious version prompting a critical examination of a known course of past events. The centrepiece of the exhibition was The Vision, almost 10 metres long. It depicts what at first glance looks like a battle scene but upon closer inspection appears to be a post-apocalyptic rebellion. In the foreground, we see King Frederick the Great of Prussia extending his hand desperately toward a peasant – the opposite of the scene in Robert Warthmüller’s painting Der König überall (The King Everywhere, 1886), where it is the peasant who is extending his hand toward the king. In Sobczak’s vision, we also see, among other images, the self-proclaimed emperor of Haiti Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Joan of Arc and a naked man with the backpack of a food delivery company.

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‘The Vision’ by Mikołaj Sobczak, 2022, from exhibition ‘Leibeigene’, photo: Voelker Renner, courtesy of Kunsthalle Muenster & artist

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In addition to painting, performance is an important means of creative expression for Sobczak. Exhibited for the first time at the 2023 Steirischer Herbst contemporary art festival in Graz, Lutzi Puppe Wutzi answers the question of what advice the past can give to the present. The artist brought history to life with a life-size puppet of Archduke Ludwig Viktor Habsburg, who was known as Luzi-Wuzi. It was an open secret that he engaged in homosexual relations and was also embroiled in many intrigues and scandals. During the performance, Sobczak spoke to the puppet about class struggle and the rights of the queer community past and present – in times when the repressive climate of days gone by is making a comeback.

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‘Lutzi Puppe Wutzi’ by Mikołaj Sobczak, 2023, performance, photo: Wolf Silveri, courtesy of artist & steirischer herbst

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Sobczak’s exhibition Heretics Forever took place at the Max Mayer gallery in Düsseldorf in the spring of 2023. The name of the exhibition, taken from the Greek word hairetikos, ‘able to choose’, refers to people with views contrary to the generally accepted, that is, those believing in heresies – ideas that contradict established dogmas and authorities. As with Sobczak’s other works and exhibitions, the subject matter draws on the stories of the marginalized, those left out of the mainstream. The heretic for Sobczak is a symbol of the person portrayed as an enemy and a threat due to non-normative views, while the former church Inquisition brought to his mind the contemporary stigmatization of queer people. One of the inspirations for the exhibition was the book Oni. Homoseksualiści w czasie II wojny światowej (They: Homosexuals During World War II) and a conversation with its author, Joanna Ostrowska. The artist depicts stories about homosexuals in Auschwitz – stories existing to this day almost exclusively in oral and written form – and interweaves them with the present. His works have irregular shapes; they are multi-layered, combining times, characters, techniques; and they blur boundaries. They resemble statues among which the viewer can stroll. Among other techniques, Sobczak used monochromatic grisaille, which in the past was used to create an illusory effect of depth and movement. The backs of the works are modelled on medieval woodcuts whose motifs are taken from the book Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a Catholic treatise on witches.

One of Sobczak’s most frequent performative collaborations are projects carried out together with Nicholas Grafia, a German artist of Filipino descent. Their performances are highly theatrical, both in terms of the script and the visual layer, costume. They evoke the theatre of Tadeusz Kantor and drag shows and show universal identity mechanisms that are independent of cultural or political differences.

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‘It’s 10PM. Do you know where your children are?’ by Nicholas Grafia & Mikołaj Sobczak, 2019, performance, photo: Roland Baege, courtesy of artists & Dortmunder Kunstverein

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Sobczak’s second major collaboration with other artists is the performance duo Polen Performance founded with Justina Los in 2015. Their performances primarily addressed issues of Polish-German identity and the role of the artist. The duo was characterised by white work overalls. In addition to public places, they also used virtual space. In 2016, they launched a performance on Snapchat – Snapformance – and took advantage of the ephemeral nature of the app, which retains content for only 24 hours. One of their most important performance actions was Deutschlandtransport (2016), which took place on the 35th anniversary of Joseph Beuys’s Polentransport action. In 1981, Beuys travelled from Düsseldorf to the Łódź Art Museum in order to donate a crate of more than a thousand works to it. In their perverse response to this action, Sobczak and Los enclosed themselves in a crate along with an archive of their works and embarked on a reverse trip to the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf. Other major performance actions by the duo included How to Behave During a Terrorist Attack, Artloop Festival, Sopot 2016; Thank You for the Performance!, Festiwal Sztuki Efemerycznej ‘Konteksty’ (Konteksty Festival of Ephemeral Art), Sokołowsko 2016; Usługi wernisażowe (Vernissage Services), CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw 2016; Polen Performance Paranormal, lokal_30, Warsaw 2015; Performance, Welcome to Polen!, Poligon, Warsaw, 2015; Usługi Performerskie (Performer Services), WRO Media Art Biennale, Wrocław 2015.

Joseph Beuys executed the Polentransport action in 1981, during which he travelled from Düsseldorf to the Museum of Art in Łódź, bringing a trunk of his work as a gift. On the 35th anniversary of this famous activity, the artistic duet Polen Performance (Justina Los and Mikołaj Sobczak) took off on the reverse journey in order to pass on the archive of their creativity to the collection of the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf. With this gesture, the creators closed the time of their sojourn in Poland.

Deutschlandtransport by Polen Performance – Image Gallery

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Mikolaj Sobczak is the winner of the 10th edition of the Spojrzenia (Outlooks) competition (2021), the winner of the POLITYKA Passport in the Visual Arts category (2021, ex aequo with Jana Shostak) and the winner of the Nagroda Fundacji Sztuki Polskiej ING (ING Polish Art Foundation Prize) awarded during Warsaw Gallery Weekend (2019). In addition to temporary exhibitions, his works are also in the permanent collections of, among others, Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Selected video works:

Upiór (Phantom), 2022
Up in the Attic, 2022
Nowe Królestwo (New Kingdom), 2019
Wyklęte (Cursed), 2018
STAR, 2017
Burza i gorące pragnienia (Storm and Ardent Desires), 2016

Selected solo exhibitions:

Heretics Forever, Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf 2023
Leibeigene, Kunsthalle Münster, Münster 2022
Guttsherren, Miejski Ośrodek Sztuki, Gorzów 2022
Niebieskie zboże (Blue Grain), Galeria Bielska BWA, Bielsko-Biala 2022
Metamorfozy (Metamorphoses), Polana Institute, Warsaw 2021
Nowe Królestwo (New Kingdom), Polana Institute, Warsaw 2019
Czym jest Oświecenie? (What Is the Enlightenment?), Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw 2018
Drag Niezłomne (Drag Unbroken), Polana Institute, Warsaw 2018
Love, Memory, Curiosity, Polana Institute, PIG-PIB Geological Museum, Warsaw 2018
Dom na głowie (House on Its Head), Zona Sztuki Aktualnej, Szczecin 2016

Written in Polish by Aleksandra Bogucka, 23 November 2023

Translated by Aleksandra Bogucka