Bartosz Kokosiński - Dysfunctional Matter

21. April - 18. June 2016

Knoll Gallery Budapest is pleased to announce its exhibition with the young artist Bartosz Kokosiński (*1984). Kokosińki lives and works in Warsaw and belongs to the emerging artists of his generation.

The exhibition Dysfunctional Matter is the second solo show in the gallery, including the presentation of his first catalogue.

Kokosiński’s works oscillate between painting and object. Particularly his series „Paintings devouring Reality“ which was central in his last solo exhibition in our gallery, embodies this hybridity: diverse everyday objects often combined thematically, which are devoured, disguised or even protected by the canvas.
In his new works Kokosiński focusses more on the parameters of painting - canvas, stretchers, color, volume, composition and especially surface. He collects, investigates, combines and composes the individual elements to create a work, which sometimes can look like a failed or flawed piece. Even through this deliberate conjunction of dysfunctional fragments, a new aesthetic entity builds. Materiality - partly as constructing element in the foreground, partly covered by color or varnish similar as a veil - plays a central role.

Kokosiński collects the materials, everyday objects and fragments he is using during his wanderings through Warsaw and other cities of Poland. For him they are a portrayal of his surroundings which often include features of discrepancy, breaks, cracks, chaos, kitsch and a certain kind of distorted beauty, the artist states. The processes from his wanderings until the final work like noticing, roaming around, collecting, reflecting, combining, alienating and creating, retrace in his works.

Bartosz Kokosiński integrates deliberately a certain dysfunctionality in his abstract works and by doing so, he evolves his characteristic visual language which can only exist by assimilating fragments, breaks, negations or ostensible incompleteness.

Supported by Polish Institut Budapest