carlier ⎜gebauer gallery is pleased to present the second extensive personal exhibition of Tomasz Kowalski, one of the key figures in the young generation of Polish artists.

Developing a strong visual reality with a specific and unique aesthetic and iconography along with a highly personal cosmology and mythology, his work is a reflection on this old medium that painting represents.

Tomasz Kowalski’s world establishes a direct and conscious relationship to the history of painting using a wide spectrum of historical references to some of the most famous masters of german expressionism such as George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix but also Andrzej Wroblewski as well as graphic design, mainly album covers from the Krautrock, the HIpgnosis team. He called this snowballing of references from past to present ‘the domino effect’ – once you excavating these works, it becomes hard to stop. However, Tomasz Kowalski is also part of a wider trend within contemporary painting. 

In The Truant, Tomasz Kowalski presents his most recent paintings, drawings and collages which are in a chromatic contrast to his earlier, darker paintings. Nonetheless, these large, vivid paintings – all unsettling, even terrifying images – relate an obscure and intense experience of illness, with endless slippage between the real and the fictional, the dream and the nightmare. The Truant as an ambivalent and metaphorical position of the artist, who is withdrawn from the world in a momentarily escapist state – the only position that also allows him and, by extension, the viewers to continue living out of time and to gain the essential distance by which to observe.