Global Abomination is an exhibition of works by two Polish painters of the younger generation - Konrad Żukowski and Mateusz Sarzyński. Konrad Żukowski, born in Kętrzyn in 1995, is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow in 2019. Mateusz Sarzyński, born in Biłgoraja in 1990, completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, but he did not submit his senior thesis and did not receive his diploma. The academy is still in possession of some 200 of Sarzyński’s works as the artist doesn’t have the space to store the pieces.
Konrad
Let’s start from the beginning. “When I was little,” Konrad says, “I’d ask myself the question, ‘What would there be if there was no world?’ And would it mean that the world would have to disappear? And that I’d disappear? I imagined the universe with the Earth in the middle and stars all around. When the world would disappear in my imagination, it would get very dark, as if the world were falling into itself and all that remained were the stars.” The one thing Konrad couldn’t imagine was the possibility that he himself would disappear. Even trying to picture it would make his head hurt. This is why he would often paint figures against a black background sprinkled with stars. He still paints these sorts of pictures sometimes. The stars are usually done in one color, yellow squeezed out of a single tube of Neapolitan yellow.
Konrad has been painting since he was two or three years old. He can’t really remember when he started. At the age of six, he already had his own studio at his grandmother’s house and he’d use oil paints on canvas. He’d be the most excited about trips to the art supply store with his grandmother. Those early paintings are still at his grandmother’s house, tucked into the attic and completely out of reach.
Konrad’s works are filled with beasts: unicorns, leopards, crabs, crocodiles, dragons and various species of fish. He’s fascinated by biology. As a child, he’d take home prizes in eco-minded competitions. He painted dinosaurs, primitive mammals and the sort of people who hunted mammoths. Today his subjects are lampreys and so-called penis fish (urechis unicinctus). Lampreys latch onto their prey and suck the lifeblood out of them. Penis fish have recently made a reappearance on a beach in San Francisco. His paintings still have the odd unicorn trotting across the horizon.
Konrad’s work also experienced a wave of naked human bodies, although he’s a bit embarrassed of them now. He painted nude figures against a black background, which was sometimes dotted with stars or other pulsating elements. It was in that period that he created a painting depicting six people pleasuring each other. The painting looks like a space station drifting through the Galaxy. In describing it, Konrad has said that could just as well have been two people, but that “a circle of six has a nicer shape.” Today the painting seems so distant to him that in order to familiarize himself with it again, he covered the bodies in tiny tattoos. One of these depicts the Virgin Mary running off with little Jesus, who’d gotten into some mischief and lost his areola. Many of these motifs have been inspired by the aesthetics of Instagram.
There are times when Konrad can produce several pictures in a day and then not even paint a single picture for a few months at a time. When he paints, it’s mostly three dark and three light paintings - for balance. And to keep from getting bored. Sometimes, he loses himself completely in the process. The painting Hitting Bottom (Swamp) was made in 12 hours in an uninterrupted sweep of the painter’s brush. It shows someone set among reptiles and amphibians, feet propped against a skeleton. Skeletons are one of Konrad’s favorite motifs. “A human being is a skeleton covered in muscles and skin,” he explains. “If we had a look at ourselves through an X-ray, we’d just be two skeletons having a conversation.”
The subjects of his paintings often seem like they’re done as self-portraits, yet that isn’t the case. There’s this tendency in painting,” he says, “that artists who paint other people often give them elements of their own physiognomy because it’s what they know best.” In the piece Drink My Piss, an actual self-portrait done in a range of hues, he paints himself as a fountain spraying fluids from his mouth. The paintings is reminiscent of the portraits of Witkacy. “I like Witkacy a lot,” says Konrad, “Especially his portraits of women, who always look tense and pissed off, as if they were afraid Witkacy would add something extra.”
Konrad doesn’t paint women. He’s not interested in women’s bodies. Just like he’s not interested in whether a given painting was done by a man or a woman. “I paint the stories that are in my head, I don’t put myself on either side. I know there are other painters, women and men, heterosexuals and homosexuals, but I’d never know that a painting was done by a woman if it wasn’t for the signature,” he says. “I’m quite the narcissist,” he says jokingly. “I only paint myself or animals.”
Mateusz
Let’s go back to the beginning once again. “When I was 14, my father hanged himself,” Mateusz says. “If my father hadn’t hanged himself, I probably wouldn’t have become an artist.” Mateusz paints between 200-300 paintings a year. He has almost 33,000 followers on Instagram. On the 28 of February 2018, he gets a message from Liam Howlett, a DJ and founding member of the band Prodigy saying he wants to buy one of his paintings, the one titled Red Devil. Mateusz doesn’t respond. There are plenty of celebrities who are interested in his work. The Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck asked Mateusz if he would design the invitations to his fashion show. The design was printed on silk t-shirts. Those who want a piece of him have to pay a hefty price.
“When people ask me if I have something to sell, I tell them I don’t. I’m looking for something new right now. I just don’t know what it is yet,” he says. Mateusz doesn’t really care much about painting. He stores them at home, in his smallish studio, which he shares with his wife Olka, or on the balcony. People often ask if he paints blood because he has sadistic tendencies. He simply believes red looks good against a black background and he wants his shades of red to be as natural as possible. This is where the drilling of the head comes from, a painting he made when his head was hurting, or the slicing of a pregnant belly. Mateusz doesn’t like for his paintings to be too pretty. He paints for pleasure. He does what he wants.
He’s afraid he’s not taking a fully honest approach in what he does. “Painting is a discipline, there should be an agenda,” he says. “One thing should come of another thing, but when I don’t like a painting, I just paint over it. My emotional stance to my work burns out when I have an idea for something else,” he adds.
Now he wants to paint less but more attentively. Instead of working a great deal only to toss his work aside, he wants to stop making paintings that aren’t essential. Before he used to paint every day so he wouldn’t fall out of practice. He hopes that when he starts painting less, his work will start to mean more to him. Right now, he capable of painting over a canvas several times in a row.
His favorite artists are Cybis and Nacht-Samborski. He’d gladly hang their works on the wall if he could afford them. “These paintings are just lovely objects,” he says. But colorism isn’t really his thing. He always thought that if he was painting for pleasure, he didn’t have to go about it in a realistic way. He’s interested in the gesture of painting. Simple sublimation and a reduction to the most essential things. It’s in the gesture that you can spot genius. Matisse using a stick to paint upon the wall while still in his bed. Perhaps Mateusz will come back one day to the craft of painting.
For the moment, he’s not entertained by the idea of making paintings that are ugly and badly done. “Back then, I thought I’d paint them over, but no. Today I think these things are all right,” he says, pointing at a series of small pictures arranged against the wall. The series of “ugly paintings” which he actually refers to as “vile” depict a rat trap with the rodent trapped inside or the aforementioned pregnant belly sliced open. “After those paintings, my cousin stopped following me on Instagram,” he says, laughing. Others ask him if he’s not ashamed of painting such things. Yet he’s intrigued by the idea of anti-art and exploring things that appear to be trivial at first glance. “It’s this anti-style that has made it so the tattoo has become quite bold and make a career for itself on the Internet,” he says. Indeed, the “ugly series” does look like tattoos that have been painted on bits of white skin canvas contained in a frame. These paintings have no depth or background.
Outside of his painting, Mateusz is also a tattoo artist. People come to him from all over the world. His work in this regard is not only recognizable, but technically quite impressive as well. He learned to do tattoos from a friend in college who wanted to exchange a painting of his for a tattoo. Mateusz agreed but asked for him to teach him the technique as part of the deal instead. He has the same approach to tattoos as to painting. If something gives him a sense of fulfillment, he does it. If not, he doesn’t do it. At first, he really wanted to perfect his technique. As with his painting, he wasn’t sure if he was capable of making truly realistic images if it hadn’t been for that series of “ugly paintings.” He says, “You just can’t plan to paint things that are ultra-ugly. It’s just like with finding amber at the beach. It’s statistically possible but it actually happens quite rarely.”
For the exhibition, Mateusz is presenting a selection of medium-sized works. They’re shown in a space filled with a cloud of black smoke coming from a smoke machine and accompanied by a drone controlled by a pilot and flying around the gallery at the show’s opening, with a hangman’s noose trailing behind it. “Perhaps it’s not the most joyful vision of the future,” Mateusz considers. He’s also thinking about a painting done directly on the wall. He’d like to paint smoke, which he thinks is an interesting element in itself. It’s the sort of smoke that won Karol Palczak the prize at the Bielska Jesien festival. “If I replicate it, everyone will say I copied him,” Mateusz says, sliding his hands in his trouser pockets and grinning. He’s generally disappointed with what’s going on in the art world. “There’s a lot of swindling going on,” he says, “You can take someone’s idea for a painting and show it in a famous gallery and some critic will go ahead and say that it’s the breakthrough of the entire year.” The truth is, Mateusz could sell his “ugly paintings” for an exorbitant sum that he’s sure someone out there is willing to pay. But that’s something he’s not willing to do.
Text based on interviews by Magda Lipska.
Global Abomination is an exhibition of works by two Polish painters of the younger generation - Konrad Żukowski and Mateusz Sarzyński. Konrad Żukowski, born in Kętrzyn in 1995, is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow in 2019. Mateusz Sarzyński, born in Biłgoraja in 1990, completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, but he did not submit his senior thesis and did not receive his diploma. The academy is still in possession of some 200 of Sarzyński’s works as the artist doesn’t have the space to store the pieces.
Konrad
Let’s start from the beginning. “When I was little,” Konrad says, “I’d ask myself the question, ‘What would there be if there was no world?’ And would it mean that the world would have to disappear? And that I’d disappear? I imagined the universe with the Earth in the middle and stars all around. When the world would disappear in my imagination, it would get very dark, as if the world were falling into itself and all that remained were the stars.” The one thing Konrad couldn’t imagine was the possibility that he himself would disappear. Even trying to picture it would make his head hurt. This is why he would often paint figures against a black background sprinkled with stars. He still paints these sorts of pictures sometimes. The stars are usually done in one color, yellow squeezed out of a single tube of Neapolitan yellow.
Konrad has been painting since he was two or three years old. He can’t really remember when he started. At the age of six, he already had his own studio at his grandmother’s house and he’d use oil paints on canvas. He’d be the most excited about trips to the art supply store with his grandmother. Those early paintings are still at his grandmother’s house, tucked into the attic and completely out of reach.
Konrad’s works are filled with beasts: unicorns, leopards, crabs, crocodiles, dragons and various species of fish. He’s fascinated by biology. As a child, he’d take home prizes in eco-minded competitions. He painted dinosaurs, primitive mammals and the sort of people who hunted mammoths. Today his subjects are lampreys and so-called penis fish (urechis unicinctus). Lampreys latch onto their prey and suck the lifeblood out of them. Penis fish have recently made a reappearance on a beach in San Francisco. His paintings still have the odd unicorn trotting across the horizon.
Konrad’s work also experienced a wave of naked human bodies, although he’s a bit embarrassed of them now. He painted nude figures against a black background, which was sometimes dotted with stars or other pulsating elements. It was in that period that he created a painting depicting six people pleasuring each other. The painting looks like a space station drifting through the Galaxy. In describing it, Konrad has said that could just as well have been two people, but that “a circle of six has a nicer shape.” Today the painting seems so distant to him that in order to familiarize himself with it again, he covered the bodies in tiny tattoos. One of these depicts the Virgin Mary running off with little Jesus, who’d gotten into some mischief and lost his areola. Many of these motifs have been inspired by the aesthetics of Instagram.
There are times when Konrad can produce several pictures in a day and then not even paint a single picture for a few months at a time. When he paints, it’s mostly three dark and three light paintings - for balance. And to keep from getting bored. Sometimes, he loses himself completely in the process. The painting Hitting Bottom (Swamp) was made in 12 hours in an uninterrupted sweep of the painter’s brush. It shows someone set among reptiles and amphibians, feet propped against a skeleton. Skeletons are one of Konrad’s favorite motifs. “A human being is a skeleton covered in muscles and skin,” he explains. “If we had a look at ourselves through an X-ray, we’d just be two skeletons having a conversation.”
The subjects of his paintings often seem like they’re done as self-portraits, yet that isn’t the case. There’s this tendency in painting,” he says, “that artists who paint other people often give them elements of their own physiognomy because it’s what they know best.” In the piece Drink My Piss, an actual self-portrait done in a range of hues, he paints himself as a fountain spraying fluids from his mouth. The paintings is reminiscent of the portraits of Witkacy. “I like Witkacy a lot,” says Konrad, “Especially his portraits of women, who always look tense and pissed off, as if they were afraid Witkacy would add something extra.”
Konrad doesn’t paint women. He’s not interested in women’s bodies. Just like he’s not interested in whether a given painting was done by a man or a woman. “I paint the stories that are in my head, I don’t put myself on either side. I know there are other painters, women and men, heterosexuals and homosexuals, but I’d never know that a painting was done by a woman if it wasn’t for the signature,” he says. “I’m quite the narcissist,” he says jokingly. “I only paint myself or animals.”
Mateusz
Let’s go back to the beginning once again. “When I was 14, my father hanged himself,” Mateusz says. “If my father hadn’t hanged himself, I probably wouldn’t have become an artist.” Mateusz paints between 200-300 paintings a year. He has almost 33,000 followers on Instagram. On the 28 of February 2018, he gets a message from Liam Howlett, a DJ and founding member of the band Prodigy saying he wants to buy one of his paintings, the one titled Red Devil. Mateusz doesn’t respond. There are plenty of celebrities who are interested in his work. The Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck asked Mateusz if he would design the invitations to his fashion show. The design was printed on silk t-shirts. Those who want a piece of him have to pay a hefty price.
“When people ask me if I have something to sell, I tell them I don’t. I’m looking for something new right now. I just don’t know what it is yet,” he says. Mateusz doesn’t really care much about painting. He stores them at home, in his smallish studio, which he shares with his wife Olka, or on the balcony. People often ask if he paints blood because he has sadistic tendencies. He simply believes red looks good against a black background and he wants his shades of red to be as natural as possible. This is where the drilling of the head comes from, a painting he made when his head was hurting, or the slicing of a pregnant belly. Mateusz doesn’t like for his paintings to be too pretty. He paints for pleasure. He does what he wants.
He’s afraid he’s not taking a fully honest approach in what he does. “Painting is a discipline, there should be an agenda,” he says. “One thing should come of another thing, but when I don’t like a painting, I just paint over it. My emotional stance to my work burns out when I have an idea for something else,” he adds.
Now he wants to paint less but more attentively. Instead of working a great deal only to toss his work aside, he wants to stop making paintings that aren’t essential. Before he used to paint every day so he wouldn’t fall out of practice. He hopes that when he starts painting less, his work will start to mean more to him. Right now, he capable of painting over a canvas several times in a row.
His favorite artists are Cybis and Nacht-Samborski. He’d gladly hang their works on the wall if he could afford them. “These paintings are just lovely objects,” he says. But colorism isn’t really his thing. He always thought that if he was painting for pleasure, he didn’t have to go about it in a realistic way. He’s interested in the gesture of painting. Simple sublimation and a reduction to the most essential things. It’s in the gesture that you can spot genius. Matisse using a stick to paint upon the wall while still in his bed. Perhaps Mateusz will come back one day to the craft of painting.
For the moment, he’s not entertained by the idea of making paintings that are ugly and badly done. “Back then, I thought I’d paint them over, but no. Today I think these things are all right,” he says, pointing at a series of small pictures arranged against the wall. The series of “ugly paintings” which he actually refers to as “vile” depict a rat trap with the rodent trapped inside or the aforementioned pregnant belly sliced open. “After those paintings, my cousin stopped following me on Instagram,” he says, laughing. Others ask him if he’s not ashamed of painting such things. Yet he’s intrigued by the idea of anti-art and exploring things that appear to be trivial at first glance. “It’s this anti-style that has made it so the tattoo has become quite bold and make a career for itself on the Internet,” he says. Indeed, the “ugly series” does look like tattoos that have been painted on bits of white skin canvas contained in a frame. These paintings have no depth or background.
Outside of his painting, Mateusz is also a tattoo artist. People come to him from all over the world. His work in this regard is not only recognizable, but technically quite impressive as well. He learned to do tattoos from a friend in college who wanted to exchange a painting of his for a tattoo. Mateusz agreed but asked for him to teach him the technique as part of the deal instead. He has the same approach to tattoos as to painting. If something gives him a sense of fulfillment, he does it. If not, he doesn’t do it. At first, he really wanted to perfect his technique. As with his painting, he wasn’t sure if he was capable of making truly realistic images if it hadn’t been for that series of “ugly paintings.” He says, “You just can’t plan to paint things that are ultra-ugly. It’s just like with finding amber at the beach. It’s statistically possible but it actually happens quite rarely.”
For the exhibition, Mateusz is presenting a selection of medium-sized works. They’re shown in a space filled with a cloud of black smoke coming from a smoke machine and accompanied by a drone controlled by a pilot and flying around the gallery at the show’s opening, with a hangman’s noose trailing behind it. “Perhaps it’s not the most joyful vision of the future,” Mateusz considers. He’s also thinking about a painting done directly on the wall. He’d like to paint smoke, which he thinks is an interesting element in itself. It’s the sort of smoke that won Karol Palczak the prize at the Bielska Jesien festival. “If I replicate it, everyone will say I copied him,” Mateusz says, sliding his hands in his trouser pockets and grinning. He’s generally disappointed with what’s going on in the art world. “There’s a lot of swindling going on,” he says, “You can take someone’s idea for a painting and show it in a famous gallery and some critic will go ahead and say that it’s the breakthrough of the entire year.” The truth is, Mateusz could sell his “ugly paintings” for an exorbitant sum that he’s sure someone out there is willing to pay. But that’s something he’s not willing to do.
Text based on interviews by Magda Lipska.