World War I is no more than a departure point for Filip Rybkowski’s solo exhibition A Theory of Clouds. The artist is primarily interested in its cultural consequences: fragmentation, dismembering and defamiliarisation of the body and the experience of historical and social reality, modern crises of representation and masculinity, as well as post-war returns to order (retour à l’ordre) – both artistic and biopolitical – marked by the birth of fascism. In his idiosyncratic manner, Rybkowski evokes and re/deconstructs classic works and modernist exhibition situations, recreating and transforming the angst-ridden experiences of the modern subject. Engaging in a creative dialogue with Marcel Duchamp, Władysław Strzemiński, Marsden Hartley, Robert Smithson, Claude Monet, and others, he constructs a series of aesthetic displacements and temporal translocations after the fashion of what André Aciman defines as anachronoids. Through his displacements and translocations, Rybkowski focuses the attention of the audience as much on the post-war reality of a century ago as on our current one, of the 2020s.
Filip Rybkowski – visual artist, graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, co-founder of the Piana Gallery Foundation. In his artistic practice, he uses critical (re)construction combined with reflection on the political nature of gestures of restoration, reproduction and conservation. His intermedia works include painting, stained glass and mosaic, drawing, photography, objets trouvés, sculpture and installation. The hallmarks of the artist’s work are the poetics of fragments and palimpsests, ubiquitous quotations and pseudo quotations, visual re/deconstructions of original artefacts, events and situations. His works have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Kode Art Museum in Bergen and the Krakauer Haus in Nuremberg, among others. In 2024, he received the main award in the Krupa Art Foundation Young Art Prize competition. He comes from Szczecin and lives and works in Kraków.
