Dimensions: 62 x 29 x 30 cm
Inscribed at the top: 'Duchamp'
Origin
purchased directly from the artist
Grażyna Kulczyk Collection
Exhibited
“GK Collection #1,” Art Stations, Poznań, March 18–June 17, 2007
Bibliography
Paweł Leszkowicz, GK Collection #1, exhibition catalog, Art Stations, Poznań 2007, p. 146 (ill.)
Biography
A graduate of the Antoni Kenar State High School of Fine Arts in Zakopane. From 1983 to 1990, he studied at the Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts at the Cieszyn Branch of the University of Silesia. He lives and works in Kraków. His artistic development was shaped by the influence of older colleagues and friends—Andrzej Szewczyk and Marek Chlanda. Lutyński is one of the few artists of the younger generation to demonstrate a creative engagement with and fascination for the art of Tadeusz Kantor, as well as the abstract paintings of Kazimir Malevich. Lutyński engages in a multifaceted practice encompassing painting, spatial installations, and performance art. He is the violinist and leader of the band Rdzeń (currently consisting of Piotr and Fryderyk Lutyński, Marek Kozica, Ewa Wiosna Libera, Zbigniew Libera, and Adam Rzepecki), which performs improvised music on stage (including accompaniment to poetry), and is the organizer of the KR736EJ project —a historic bus-turned-art installation that serves as a traveling outdoor stage, kitchen, and sleeping quarters for the band and their guests. In the KR736EJ project, the band collaborated with, among others, Ryszard Krynicki and Marcin Świetlicki, as well as with numerous visual artists and musicians. Lutyński’s work reveals, in many respects, characteristics traditionally associated with Kraków’s artistic community. These are expressed in the absolutization (following Tadeusz Kantor) of the “poor object” in art, a certain bohemian streak (as, for example, in the design of a traveling studio—a place for artists to meet and work), and finally in Lutyński’s deliberate allusions, in his exhibition arrangements, to the stuffy bourgeois salon with its worn-out rugs, old furniture, and hunting trophies. Lutyński’s works can be abstract paintings, theatrical installations, or surrealist montages, in keeping with Lautréamont’s dictum that art is the encounter on an autopsy table between a sewing machine and an umbrella. However, what particularly sets the artist apart is his relationship to nature and culture—the establishment in his work of a unique connection between the human world (art) and non-human beings. In his exhibitions, Lutyński has juxtaposed live animals with his paintings. Chickens appeared at the exhibition “Luminous Guides” at the Potocka Gallery in Kraków in 1997, and horses at Kraków’s Alchemia gallery in the exhibition “Between Horse and Painting” (2003). Lutyński’s other projects include “Bird Column” at the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery in Kraków (2003) and “Music for Fish” at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw (2005). In his works, significant materials appeared in the context of oil-on-canvas paintings: straw, wood, wax, dried insects, and bird eggs. For Lutyński, the reality of the abstract image and the animal world is permeated by the same universal energy. The “artificiality” of art and the “vitality” of life are equally real, and in this way of thinking, the artist is close to many representatives of the constructivist avant-garde from the early 20th century. Lutyński also emerges as a pioneer of “Anthropocene art”—a movement so widespread among the youngest generation of artists—which he has been practicing since the early 1990s. The artist has had many solo exhibitions and has participated in numerous group exhibitions. His body of work to date was summarized in an exhibition at the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery in Kraków in 2020, for which a comprehensive catalog was published.
