Artur Kościelski

Born in 1988 in Kościerzyna, graduated in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Toruń’s Nicolas Copernicus University, received the Tymon Niesiołowski Medal for the best artistic diploma in 2012 – “Land(e)scape”, supervised by Prof. Piotr Klugowski. Winner of Prof. Stanisław Borysowski’s Award in painting (2010/2011) and a number of Kościerzyna education grants. His minimalistic compositions deal with nostalgia, memory, identity and space.

Artur Kościelski’s painting confronts the question of its sense in the position of authenticating values that have been excluded from artistic space in recent years. It is a return to the integrity of an artist’s internal world, a man with his depiction of interpersonal spaces and multilayered reality surrounding us. It is existence arrested in a picture opening a subconscious craving to realize the most metaphysical needs of the modern man. Facing the oppressive dominance of imaginary principles regulating the world’s order, we tend more and more often to return to the natural purity of our inner world. Supported by art and – as is the case with Artur Kościelski – painting of human substance, this world becomes a tool of discourse with the pseudo-modern state of contemporary civilization, which is forced on us and which subjugates us. Kościelski’s painting releases connections which define our existence, our attachment and relationship with places, events and people who we hope will help us revive our own sense of value. Classical painting, based on the use of the colour’s monochromatic essence, is the real strength of his works. The colour, which builds the relationship with an expected metaphysical state, is the added value here, amplifying the power of expression. At the same time the form, emphasized by colour, strengthens the reflective aspect of receiving and experiencing the painting, which exists in some undetermined space. It makes you stop and look into yourself. The technique is simple to the point of being too simple – far from crazy or adventurous, stuck in the uncertainty of meeting the innards we avoid, blinded by modernity, as if it was passé. Simple painting, nothing to it. Not much, in any case. And this “not much” proves his painting’s purity and merit, its significance. Artur Kościelski also accompanies his paintings with video installations, adding extra value to the final effect.      

Wacław Kuczma