Art Review - At Hauser and Worth, Ziolkowski’s U.S. Solo Debut - NYTimes.com
The young Polish painter Jakub Julian Ziolkowski is the subject of quite a bit of buzz and clamor among collectors. Born in Zamosc, Poland, in 1980, he had his first three solo shows in his homeland in 2004, starting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, where he studied. In 2005 he had his first solo outside Poland, at Galerie Martin Janda in Vienna. In 2006 his second non-Polish solo took place at the London gallery of the contemporary art juggernautHauser & Wirth, on view during the Frieze Art Fair. I remember seeing that show and finding it riveting but retro, like some unexpected Eastern European offshoot of the Italian Transavantgarde of Sandro Chia and Enzo Cucchi.
Tom White for The New York Times
“Timothy Galoty & the Dead Brains”: Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s show (and the painting by the same name), is at Hauser & Wirth. More Photos »
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After making a splash last year in “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” at the New Museum in Manhattan — where his jewel-toned fantasies stood out amid the prevailing videos, installations and sculptures — Mr. Ziolkowski is now having his American solo debut with Hauser & Wirth New York. You could say he works fast. All 28 of the paintings and gouaches in this show — titled “Timothy Galoty & the Dead Brains,” in tribute to an imaginary rock band — date from this year.
The band is conjured in several colorful, vaguely Neo-Expressionist paintings that resemble concert posters; one features a figure with two faces and a split skull from which his brain is emerging like a jack-in-the-box. The brain wears the same striped shirt and eyeball-patterned bow tie as the larger figure. (Brains and eyeballs recur in other works here, as do self-portraits of the bespectacled artist, who in this piece waves from behind a candle in the lower right corner.)
Mr. Ziolkowski seems to work largely alone in an area of his own devising, excavating material from layers of painting’s recent and distant past and binding them into units that are variously horrific, beautiful, pertinent and sexually charged.
He might be called a just-paint painter. In contrast to artists like Luc Tuymans, Michael Krebber, Josh Smith or Tomma Abts, his efforts involve no photographic sources; thick, bravura brushwork; eccentric techniques; degraded everyday materials; or Conceptual frameworks. He avoids extremes of pure abstraction or precise realism, and he seems completely uninterested in painting as an object or an installation-art element.
Mr. Ziolkowski’s paintings initially look slightly old-fashioned and juvenile, as if they have just emerged from a prewar attic or a hyper-hormonal teenager’s bedroom. He works in oil; his surfaces are smooth but not shiny, painted quickly with a distinct lack of preciousness. Small, rushed strokes predominate, with occasional forays into linear improvisations that deftly balance geometry and image. Some clear sources of inspiration include Surrealism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Northern Renaissance painting, Picasso, cartooning and children’s book illustration, all filtered through his obsessive, of-the-moment imagination.
His art tells many stories, starting with an account of its own making, but then moving on to war, religion, violence, sex, the psyche and human folly. It often ends up in the vicinity of the body — whole or in scattered parts, sacred or profane — in ways that creep up and shock you. One of the show’s larger works is “The Clash,” in which two immense male and female figures do violent battle, colliding with such force that their heads shatter and the flesh rips from their bones. The composition brings to mind the demonic bird-creature of Ernst’s “Ange du Foyer” as rethought by Philip Guston and Otto Dix.
But Mr. Ziolkowski can also veer toward fluorescent, encompassing tonalities and compositional unities that feel almost classically modern once you get beyond the gore. An example is the all-over pinkish field of a largish work titled “Caligula.” At least from a local point of view, this expanse of cartoonish body parts and apertures suggests that Mr. Ziolkowski might be bent on negotiating a stylistic truce between two old nemeses of New York in the late 1940s: the Surrealistic entwined bodies of Pavel Tchelitchew, the author of“Hide-and-Seek,” and Jackson Pollock’s entwined skeins of paint.
Another all-over work is “Untitled (Into the Hole),” in which bodies and household garbage, the artist himself and a raft on which at least a few of the seven deadly sins seem to be in progress are all oozing toward a drainlike hole. And then there’s the yellow-pink landscape “Milk & Honey,” a Matta-like ode to breasts.
Mr. Ziolkowski’s paint style and application are under constant adjustment. “Untitled (King of Israel)” is a kind of Picassoid portrait, but also a biological and geological cross-section — with a crown of thorns — whose twisted, patterned strata form both an automatist cartography and a tortured body. In contrast, “Pilgrimage” is an old-masterish update. It shows two rockers, one gory and one hairy, leading a line of skeletons across four small canvases and through the four seasons, during which the creatures progressively gain flesh, muscle and independent brains.
There’s a grossness to this work and its bodily extremes that wasn’t as visible last year at the New Museum, where Mr. Ziolkowski’s efforts looked, in the main, a bit more mature and varied. Maybe it is just a phase he is going through. Maybe he wants to counter the chic gallery setting with some unsettling rawness, letting us know that success is fine, but that he doesn’t intend to take it easy, or be easy to take.
