Artur Przebindowski
painter, printmaker
Born on 14th of July 1967 in Chrzanów. Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków Defended his diploma under prof. Roman Banaszewski in 1993.
Author of over twenty individual exhibitions, including ones at the Municipal Gallery in Wrocław (Mondrian’s Tree, 2020), at the ASP Gallery in Kraków (Homo Faber, 2016), Płock Art Gallery (Immersion, 2015), the exhibitions accompanying the 22nd and 24th Festivals of Contemporary Polish Painting in Szczecin (2008, 2012), as well as the “Megalopolis” series shown at the BWA Gallery in Bielsko-Biała, in the Regional Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts “Konduktorownia” in Częstochowa (2011) and in the Rzeszów BWA Gallery (2013).
Participant of group exhibitions, including ones at the Municipal Gallery in Wrocław (Robinson’s Ship – exhibition of figurative art from Central and Eastern Europe), MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków (Artists from Kraków. Generation 1950-1969), Zachęta – National Gallery of Art (The Landscape of Polish painting), Sielecki Castle – Sosnowiec Art Centre (Roots of the Contemporary. Polish Art After 1945, 2019), Stara Kordegarda in Warsaw (1996), the exhibition of the collection of the Bielsko-Biała BWA Gallery in Zlin, Czech Republic, the exhibition of the Miyauchi Poland-Japan Foundation, Tokyo (1996), the Cultural Centre in Athens (10 Painters from Poland, 2000); the Bloxham Gallery in London (Into Europe. New Art for the New Reality 2004); 8 Arte Laguna Prize, Arsenale, Venice; the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany (Polonica S-major, 2012).
Participant of numerous painting competitions and festivals: 8 Arte Laguna Prize, Venice 2014; Premio Combat Prize in Livorno, 2014; Bielsko Autumn, BWA Gallery in Bielsko-Biała (1995, 1997, 2011); Triennial of Small-Format Painting Forms, Wozownia Gallery, Toruń (1997, 2007- nomination for a prize); Festival of Contemporary Polish Painting (1996, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012).
Participant in art fairs, including ones at The Bloxham Galleries during The Affordable Art Fair in London (2004), Warsaw Art Fair (2009, 2013, 2016), RING, Contemporary Museum Wrocław, ADAF (Annual Dutch Art Fair), Amsterdam (2013), Huntenkunst, Ulft, (2012,2013), Kunst en Living, Rotterdam, (2011), Affordable Art Fair, Hamburg (2021).
In 1998 he received the Grand Prix at the “Shower- Birth of Pleasure” painting competition in Bad Zwischenahn, Germany; in 2010 the Grand Prix of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage at the 23rd Festival of Contemporary Polish Painting in Szczecin; and in 2011 the Distinction and the Viewers’ Choice Award at the 40th Painting Biennial Bielsko Autumn, as well as the Popular Jury Prize at the Premio Combat Prize in 2014 in Livorno.
MY PRIVATE GEOGRAPHY / GRUNWALDZKA 80 /
Taking my latest exhibition as an opportunity, I wish to speak about my microcosm, which I experienced in my childhood. This particular topographic system was constituted by the conjunction of the Grundwaldzka street, where I lived, and Mickiewicza, where I went to school and for ice cream at Mrs Trzetrzelewska’s place, the famous Mrs Basia… Further out was the Cultural Centre, where i took part in Mr Czesław Kempiński’s art classes, the church in the market, “Złocień” cinema, where I would watch the children’s matinees on Sundays. I come from a place at the junction of two worlds. In Jaworzno, my hometown, influences of Silesia and Lesser Poland interpenetrated – you could hear people use both dialects, and everyday life was stretched between the farming tradition and the industrial reality. This duality – between Lesser Poland and Silesia, Kraków and the mythical Galicia – was for me something natural. This was the atmosphere in which I grew up.
I have been interested in three cities at the Tripoint for a long time. In the context of Sosnowiec, there has been a story circulating in my family, which is perhaps real. My grandmother lived in Klimontów, which used to be a separate town before it became part of Sosnowiec. My grandfather came from Jaworzno. It was said that they met as teenagers when they were crossing the Przemsza, carrying goods to the other side of the border – between the tzarist Russia and Austria-Hungary. This story always speaks to my imagination. Two young people, inhabiting different countries and living their daily lives at the junction of these realities.
Borders – whether political, mental, or artistic – have always fascinated me. Once I realized that Niwka and Modrzejów, today outskirts of Sosnowiec, in distant past belonged to the same empire as the distant Port Arthur or Anadyr on the Bering Sea. Likewise Jaworzno – in the Habsburg times belonging administratively together with Trieste and Dubrovnik. These juxtapositions have always fascinated me and located me mentally within a specific historical continuity, disrupted by the brutal reality of the soviet domination in this part of Europe.
The works presented at this exhibition are mainly paintings from the Megalopolis series, but also pictures from the Walls and Signs series, as well as new compositions: vertical, horizontal, and spatial objects – my most recent series that came into existence unexpectedly – out of my own painting palettes. For years I treated them as no more than tools, but suddenly I noticed in them pure, spontaneous expression. So, parallel with the monumental canvas, small-format works are created, intuitively, with no plan. What has existed beside me for years, suddenly became a value in itself.
In its essence, reality naturally changes constantly, but what interests me most is our changing way of looking at the reality. And this is what attracts me most to painting. My work is an attempt to capture the moment of focus at which point the painting becomes more than just a surface covered in paint…
This exhibition is a reflection on how reality changes not of its own accord, but depending on how we look at it. I don’t mean some great breakthroughs, but tiny shifts in perception, which suddenly reveal something that was obvious and yet invisible before. I don’t mean a moment of epiphany, but a lasting state of concentration, in which the painting begins to operate on its own terms. This is neither a romantic nor a mysterious process, but something very concrete – a kind of tension that either appears or it doesn’t.
Małgorzata Malinowska-Klimek
The idea of the city
The city is an exceptionally human idea. Just like art. The combination of these two elements opens room for reflection on space, created by man for himself and other people, on the urban climate and colour, specific aesthetics, on the energy of agglomeration, enclosed in a picture. The combination of these elements gives rise to the painting of Artur Przebindowski.
"We will not return to caves! There are too many of us," wrote Stanisław Jerzy Lec. But, as history shows, we can build our own! For thousands of years, we have been repeating the same pattern in different materials: walls and vaulting, if possible from the most durable materials available. Contemporary construction, consciously or not, refers to these roots: in Krakow, the city where Przebindowski lives, new apartment buildings often look like stacks of separate cubes. Standardized boxes for living / boxes for people. Apart from individual outsiders, the vast majority of people want to be city dwellers. The 21st century is the culmination of intensive urbanization - a global process that has led to the creation of multi-million cities, in which the population of each country is concentrated.
The city is an extremely dense environment. It provides stimuli and interacts with its inhabitants. All interpersonal, spatial and aesthetic relations combine and shape the inhabitant in a particularly intensive way. Each city has its own specificity: a unique combination of ethos, possibility and necessity. The aspirations and disappointments of successive generations. For Artur Przebindowski, the key city for his personal development was his hometown of Jaworzno. When preparing the exhibition at the Extravagance Gallery in the Sosnowiec Art Centre – Sielecki Castle, the artist drew on the experience of growing up in a place that was once a border town: at the meeting point of different traditions, in a homogeneous environment, but facing another – also homogeneous. A place of non-obvious transgressions, in times of historical transformation. For Przebindowski, Jaworzno is a space of first impressions, fascinations and conscious reflections. Becoming interested in art and discovering that others do not share this interest. You don’t choose your hometown: you have to embrace it with the territory. It takes decades to appreciate what was once a burden and turned out to be a resource. It takes a mature artist's consciousness to draw from those experiences.
Individual experiences create an internal city, unique and unlike any other. Although we touch upon a common generational experience, each variable weaves a separate variation on the same theme – the hometown – within a person. Przebindowski explores these territories, simultaneously searching for a supra-local dimension, transcendent to concrete matter. He delves into urban iconography and iconosphere. He explores available and living cultural codes.
From its very beginning, the city has stood in opposition to non-urban areas. This was clearly shown towards the end of the Renaissance by contrasting culture, represented by the city or palace, with nature. The logic and purposefulness of human activity were juxtaposed with the untamed, potentially dangerous forces of nature. Combining these elements in the form of mannerist gardens was a kind of parlour game, after which the participants were all the more eager to return to life in the enclosed spaces of buildings. In the positive sense, the city appeared in antiquity as a spiritual and cultural representation of the nation (Jerusalem, Athens). In the negative sense, it was perceived as a place of decline in morals, but also as a concentration of a huge mass of people (biblical Nineveh). This duality is especially visible in the 19th century, when as a result of industrialisation, the first cities with a population exceeding one million inhabitants came into existence. They gave people new opportunities for learning, work and leisure, but took away the sense of being rooted in tradition. They created apologists and frustrated people. Their symbol is the hypercity – Megalopolis. The name comes from the clusters of multi-million agglomerations on the East Coast of the USA, but is currently used to describe a geographical and cultural phenomenon.
Artur Przebindowski's painting reaches for all these tropes, tests them, integrates them into a whole and creates them anew. It uses the images and associations the author encounters to extract the essence of the city from them. The aesthetics of individual works direct the viewer towards different areas of the world: thanks to this, we have the impression that we are watching Brazilian favelas and London squats. However, there is always a certain aspect that eludes classification. Probably because, as the artist himself emphasizes, he does not paint a specific city, but rather the idea of one. He does not convey topographical or architectural details – instead, he focuses on what is typical and universal. The crowding of buildings corresponds to life in a tight space, the layering of fates, sometimes overlapping, sometimes parallel. The colours correspond to the atmosphere of the cluster: sometimes dark and dangerous, sometimes full of new energy, youth and life. It is always an intense, significant colour. Even the greys are supported by the everyday visual experience of city dwellers. The artist builds compositions meticulously, controls the whole until the moment of placing a colour dominant. Moving away from the material source, he tends towards abstraction, and yet never crosses this boundary. This tendency is especially visible in the "Walls" series. At first glance, these are abstract compositions, with an ambiguous arrangement of lines, reminiscent of Mondrian's neoplasticism. After a while, the viewer's mind realizes that they are looking at a cropped and cleansed fragment of the material world: a curtain behind which an individual life is hidden, a wall of a box. The artist uses the view to create a harmonized, almost sensual image with extraordinary sensitivity to form and colour. However, he does not explain anything - he does not present us with the hidden heroes of the image. He leaves us with a mystery.
Thanks to these procedures, viewing Artur Przebindowski's paintings breaks us away from the visual habits of contemporary art. It refers to our individual experiences, contrasts them and encourages our own reflections.
It intrigues and fascinates.
Once, I would have been ashamed of this, but today I take pride in the fact that I come from a small mining town, from a working class family. I feel that this is what built my spirituality in a particular way and gave me a certain mental trait related to the method and the discipline of work. Observing people, especially men from the milieu in which I grew up, is for me a kind of Hemingway ethos, the masculine way of organizing life, work, and taking up challenges. Now, years later, I have a big sentiment for the atmosphere of that place, for my father, his brothers – simple people with no pretensions, and their very simple and beautiful forms of life, grounded in rituals of the everyday.
II
Painting cannot be contrived. This is why in my painting I hold on so tightly to the phenomenon of the visible world, this is why I am so emotionally addicted to it. Supposedly Jerzy Nowosielski once told one of his students not to attempt to paint above his abilities. The painting must remain in symmetry with the creator. We can only move within the area available to us. I see painters who have escaped into non-figurative forms. I find no consent to this in me. I must take the round way to the situation in which my cities become almost abstract compositions. It seems this is my mental structure, and I cannot and will not give up the fascination that I have for observing the world.
III
For me as a painter the city is an element of two orders coexisting in parallel, and even abolishing one another: the institutional and the spontaneous, human order. Both contribute to the phenomenon of the city and this is precisely what I find the most fascinating. Cities, created by humans in an arbitrary and largely unpredictable way after all, are for me an impulse, although in reality I am not interested in any specific local colour.
IV
Just like people get lost in the labyrinths of cities, which have become my obsession, so I – sooner or later – get lost within every new painting I have started. Frequently my original assumptions about the composition, the form prove to be illusory, insufficient, get swallowed up by the new chaos, resulting from the dynamics of the process in which I participate. At some stage of my work, I often get the conviction that this is a failed painting, that it somehow slipped away from me, and my original assumptions or imaginations have come to nothing. As if the painting was trying to communicate to me that the matter I’m touching is far more complex than I thought. And this is an emotional shock. Only after I have contained it does the actual work on the painting begin.
V
It is of significant value to me that my OBJECTS are not classic painting, but something ambiguous, something from the border of painting, sculpture, and installation. And this is how they raise my interest. Here I have an extraordinary opportunity to juxtapose two contradictory matters: the operation of the chromaticism of the colour captured in a quick gesture and the ordered, geometrical structure of the relief of the object itself.
And to enter a more personal space, creating these miniature, colourful compositions is good camouflage, to recall once again the times of the shining Majorette and Matchbox car models which I collected as a boy in the 1970s.
