Following in the footsteps of artists such as Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, Bownik has created his own distinct and recognisable style.
The Polish Institute in Düsseldorf will host Bownik’s photo exhibiton Dinge an Sich (Things in Themselves), which is a part of the yearly Düsseldorf Photo Weekend. The exhibition’s curator, Iwo Zmyślony, writes:
Following in the footsteps of artists such as Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, Bownik has created his own distinct and recognisable style. His works seduce the audience with visual power, invoking an intellectually sophisticated game with the history of contemporary visual culture. They are discreetly erudite, brilliantly ironic and meditatively focused
In an innovative way, Bownik combines time-consuming workshop studio photography with the traditions of painting and conceptual art. He breaks the barriers and demarcations between them. In his work, universal topics, such as youth, death and transience, are given new forms and disguises. In a way, it is a neoconservative stance: a utopian attempt to rehabilitate the classical concept of beauty in a world of smartphones, tablets, Instagram and Twitter.
Bownik’s large-format photographs depict themes of youth, reconstruction of values and the way technology influences everyday life. Visual conventions drawing from cinema, police archives and classical pictorial depictions make up the map on which the artist moves.
Born in 1977, Bownik is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. His photos are in the permanent collections of Huis Marseille Musem for Photography in Amsterdam, the National Library in Warsaw, ING Polish Art Foundation and in private collections. He was nominated for Paszport Polityki 2014 and is the creator of Disassembly, which won the main prize in the Photographic Publication of the Year 2014 competition and was nominated at Fotobookfestival Kassel 2014). Bownik lives and works in Warsaw.
Bownik: Dinge an Sich (Things in Themselves)
Düsseldorf Photo Weekend 2016
Gallery of the Polish Institute in Düsseldorf
Citadellstr. 7, 40213 Düsseldorf
Curator: Iwo Zmyślony
Source: www.polnisches-institut.de, duesseldorfphotoweekend.de, bownikstudio.com, translated by OK, 28 Jan 2016