Piotr Makowski

Born in 1985 in Gdynia, where he also lives and works.

Piotr Makowski was simultaneously studying at two universities, on and off – architecture at Gdańsk Technical University and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. He came to our school at the right time, just when painting began to flourish in all its diversity. The times of copying faded photographs had been over and the gesture of unrestrained expressive freedom was discovered. The man who likes good architecture, and intends to design it, was heading towards abstraction and geometry right from the very beginning. The freedom of gesture and youthful insolence allowed him to avoid certain imitations and to begin his own dialogue with the art he likes. Dividing the visible by means of screens and lines creates a situation which somehow resembles geometric, abstract, concrete art, except that it introduces freedom, gesture, body language individualising the painting object, thus granting it a new interpretative power. He is yet another example of an artist who attempts to build his own language on the basis of pure art, without burdening it with excessive literary or historical meanings. It turns out this direction offers the artist new opportunities. The distance felt in the background does not restrain him, quite the opposite – it frees him from an attempted continuation of certain myths, thus deconstructing them in his own way. It is illusory to ascribe what we see to what we already know. He makes an impression, or makes us feel, that we already know what we see. However, on closer inspection, we must verify our knowledge because it is not what we would like it to be. Dividing the visible because it refers to what we see clashes with a contour, screen, grid, blot or network of lines to deconstruct the aesthetics of our perception.     

Krzysztof Gliszczyński