Opening Reception: 28 October 6-8pm
Gallery closed 2-4 November for private event
"Fools" brings together Tomasz Kulka and Leander Herzog, two artists who confront contemporary absurdities through divergent practices.
Kulka's paintings probe the darker corners of human nature, excavating repressed desires and societal malaise. His recent work grapples with the Anthropocene, portraying humanity's self-destructive tendencies through carefully rendered flora and fauna. Working in miniature, Kulka translates personal experiences into broader commentaries on social decay. The artist's native Wolbrom, a declining industrial town in southern Poland, serves as a recurring motif and metaphor for urban degradation. Kulka's canvases depict a world devoid of hope, where daily routines smother any spark of rebellion against pervasive apathy. Quasi-religious imagery peppers his compositions, a sardonic nod to art's attempts at gravitas in an era of superficiality.
Herzog, known widely for generative art, takes an unexpected turn with his new "Credit Suisse" series, where he appropriates damaged advertisements, recontextualizing them as readymades for our hyper-connected era. Each piece becomes a unique artifact, impossibly detailed and irreplicable, born from the unconscious gestures of anonymous workers. It's an exercise in aesthetic archeology, unearthing painterly qualities in the most mundane of surfaces. This approach critiques algorithmic fetish in computer art's processes and the commodification of public space, extracting accidental beauty from corporate detritus, each piece a unique artifact born from anonymous gestures.
"Fools" juxtaposes Kulka's meticulously crafted visions of societal ennui with Herzog's provocative acts of aesthetic salvage, offering a discomfiting meditation on art-making in an age of precarity.
