Artist: Mirosław Filonik
Curator: Andrzej Zagrobelny
Dates: November 29, 2024 – January 26, 2025
Opening night: November 29, 2024 at 6 PM
Venue: Gdańsk City Gallery (GGM1), 27/29 Piwna Street
Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 12 PM – 6 PM
Mirosław Filonik’s works seem to emerge from darkness. His installations, minimalist in form, illuminate the gallery space. For years, the artist has been using fluorescent lamps in his art. His first sculptural works with the motif of light were created in the second half of the 1980s when Filonik was a member of Neue Bieriemiennost, an artistic group which he had founded together with Marek Kijewski and Mirosław Bałka. A few years later, while working independently, Filonik focused almost exclusively on lamps, which became emblematic of his entire subsequent creative activity.
In his installations, simple and rhythmically connected coloured fluorescent lamps become the material from which various geometric shapes are formed. Their structures are closely related to the architecture of their place of origin. Filonik avoids giving titles to his works; since around 2000, his subsequent projects have been called Daylight System, which is also the name of a light bulb type. In this way, Filonik defies superficial associations or unnecessary narratives, directing the viewer’s attention towards a more sensual perception of his art.
In the first lines of his poem Another One, the American poet Ron Padgett writes: “When you’re a child / you learn / there are three dimensions: / height, width, and depth. / Like a shoebox. / Then later you hear / there’s a fourth dimension: / time.” Filonik’s installations evoke a similar sensation: like the banal shoebox mentioned by the poet, they seem to have strictly defined dimensions. Yet there is something more in them, something immeasurable, which offers the viewer an almost metaphysical experience.
The fleeting duration of Filonik’s monumental works is often a deliberate artistic strategy. His spectacular site-specific projects, embracing the context of the place where they are created, exist physically for the duration of a given project only. The current exhibition shown in the gallery includes selected works built from modular elements in the last period of Filonik’s career. An important part of the exhibition is the presented photographic and film documentation of more than a hundred monumental lighting installations presented by the artist in cultural institutions and public spaces (including on building facades) since the end of the 1980s.* Such a perspective allows the viewers to get to know and better understand the works of Filonik as one of the most important Polish visual artists of the contemporary period.
* “Mirosław Filonik | Realizations \ Artworks 1988-2019” Courtesy of the Profile Foundation
Mirosław Filonik was born in 1958 in Białystok. He currently lives and works in Warsaw. From 1980 to 1985, he studied at the Faculty of Sculpture at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts. He received his PhD from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań in 2008. In 1985, together with Mirosław Bałka and Marek Kijewski, he founded Neue Bieriemiennost, which is regarded as one of the most important Polish art groups of the 1980s. Up until 1989, the group members jointly organised exhibitions in the spirit of new expression and post-painterly sculpture.
Since 1990, Filonik has focused on individual work, creating mainly lighting installations from original fluorescent lamps. He has shown his art at more than hundred group and solo exhibitions, including in Poland at the Zachęta National Art Gallery, Bielska BWA Gallery, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (CSW) in Warsaw, and Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdańsk, as well as in Polish Institutes in Berlin, Leipzig and Rome, and various galleries abroad, including in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Spain, and Venezuela. His works can be found in private and state-own collections, such as the Centre for Polish Sculpture (CRP) in Orońsko, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig.
Media partners:
NN6T, Szum Magazine, Prestige Tricity Magazine, Gdańsk.pl, Trójmiasto.pl
