Bio
Painting founded on ethics, says Marek Szczesny, is an art of constructed form, with a history that needs to be processed and a metaphysics that must be fathomed. The act of painting, a constant process of dismounting and reconfiguring anew is not, then in Szczesny's art, an abandonment of the contemporary territory, but a difficult attempt at settling there in a different way. This is not a question of taking root but of an unattainable balance between the current place and the non-place(utopia). This is territory that is not too well defined, torn and glued together, punctured with holes and patched up. Contemporaneity understood in such a way, close to Szczesny's heart, is a balancing between the current and memory, which justifies the current in circular returns, crossing lines, shapes superimposed on one another like carbon copies, in the layers of colors that shine through. What is remembered ( invisible) becomes visible during the creation of a painting. Filing the canvas with forms means the gluing together of those biographical crumbs that have stuck in memory as extraordinary into some unfinished whole.
Extract from “Marek Szczesny” by Andrzej Turowski, National Museum of Poznan, 2003
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Marek Szczesny was born in Poland in 1939. In the latter half of the 1950's he irregularly attended the State Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk as a free, auto-didactic, student. In the 1960’s he was associated with a group of artists from the 'ZAK' students club in Gdansk. He worked as a scenographer for the group, created posters and showed his first works. In 1978 Szczesny left Poland for Paris where he obtained a Ford Foundation scholarship. During this time he exhibited more than 30 solo exhibitions, as well as participating in many group exhibitions. Selected exhibitions include Agi Schoning, Gallery, Zurich; Rosa Turetsky Gallery, Geneve; FIAC, Paris; Akie Aricchi, Paris; The National Museum in Poznan, Poland, “Polish Art of 20th Century”; Contemporary Center of Art, Toulon, France; Osaka 2001 Triennale International Exhibition of Contemporary Art; and Galeria Foksal, Warsaw. Between 1996 and 2008 he was awarded grants in the United States four times: Edward Albee Foundation in New York; Bemis Center in Omaha; the Pollock-Krasner Foundation; and the Gottleib Foundation, New York. He lives and works in Paris.
"In my work topography plays an important part as a transfiguration of landscape and space, infinity and closure. The lines on my surfaces cover the territory of the painting, dilineating paths, sides of roads, devious routes and highroads in a pictorial map full of depressions, ravines and bulges. I consider myself a nomad wandering over established routes much like a mountain climber retraces the path of previous wanderer."