Tomasz Kowalski

born 1984 in Szczebrzeszyn, Poland,
lives and works in Kraków, Poland.

Tomasz Kowalski is a painter. He creates fantastical worlds, treating them as pretexts for experiments with visual art. What particularly matters to him is the substance of painting, its composition and the manner of constructing space.

T.R.I.P. is a reference to a physical and mental journey, but also to a journey into death. Kowalski’s work is a mystification, inspired by another work that was also a mystification. This comic-style series is a journal from an expedition carried out by a group of friends who followed in the steps of Jacek Kryszkowski. In 1985 he visited the grave of Witkacy and published the documentation of the action in the underground magazine Hola Hoop, complete with a small bag of powdered bones, supposedly dug out on the site. Kowalski’s jocular works are painted flatly, softly – at times reminiscent of delirious hallucinations. Formally, they hark after the canon of modernity, for instance Andrzej Wróblewski's Chauffeur.

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