EXHIBITION: EMIL BUCKI. CLINCH
A hand that points in warning, or perhaps an accusing hand? A brotherly embrace, an attempt to offer support, or the mutual grasp of two fighting figures? Emil Bucki’s paintings are rife with similarly ambiguous gestures. Their depictions often allude to the visual culture of the Soviet Union, particularly its propaganda and gymnastics textbooks. However, Bucki does not draw on them to preserve the past for posterity or to revisit it nostalgically. By reappropriating images from the past, he comments on the social reality in post-communist Poland and Ukraine – two countries with which he is linked through family ties and life experiences. In the culture of both, the artist perceives a clear tension between the affects that organise the sensitivity and self-awareness of a significant portion of its inhabitants – familiarity and pride on the one hand, and suspicion and shame on the other. This tension, however, currently characterises not only the mentality of communities inhabiting Central and Eastern Europe.
The exhibition title – Clinch – refers to the wrestling hold in which two figures are joined in one of Bucki’s paintings. However, the colloquial connotations of the word remain significant as well. It represents an ambivalent experience in which interdependence with other people appears simultaneously as a higher necessity – as a means of survival in crisis conditions – and a source of unrelenting fear and anxiety. The exhibition is organised as part of the Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Award for the best graduation project from the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow.
Emil Bucki – born in 1999 in Lublin; a graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, he completed his diploma in the studio of Professor Grzegorz Sztwiertnia. Winner of the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art Award for the best diploma from the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, the Grand Prix of the 12th edition of the “New Image / New Gaze” competition organised by the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznań, and Grand Prix of the 6th Leon Wyczółkowski Painting Competition organised by BWA Bydgoszcz. He is a scholarship holder of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. He lives and works in Kraków. Through his artistic practice, he explores the relationships between the individual and society, the intimate and the public, individualism and collectivity. He draws on psychology, sociology, politics, and his own observations of social norms in the former Eastern Bloc.
Arkadiusz Półtorak – cultural studies scholar, art critic, and curator, assistant professor at the Department of Performance Studies at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University. President of the Polish Section of AICA. Co-founder of the independent space for contemporary art and music “Elementarz dla Mieszkańców Miast” (A Primer for City Dwellers) in Krakow, and co-curator of the re:elementarz (re:primer) project at the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków (together with Martyna Nowicka). Member of the Board of the Museum of Art in Łódź and the Jury of the Jerzy Stajuda Art Criticism Award. He organised numerous exhibitions and other artistic projects and collaborated with institutions such as with the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art and the Studio Gallery in Warsaw, BWA Tarnów, and the State Art Gallery in Sopot.
Curator: Arkadiusz Półtorak
Coordinator: Agnieszka Sachar
Visual identity: Rafał Sosin