Science Non Fiction Horror Story

The temporary exhibition at the Regional Museum in Stalowa Wola is a continuation of the artist’s recent exhibition projects held in Czestochowa and Krakow under the titles News for Lulu and More News for Lulu. The exhibition shows new works, but also those created in the last few years. They are more or less directly related to the issue of the so-called visualization of evil. The motifs of the paintings are taken from archival photographs. They evoke figures or events from the past entangled in dramatic circumstances related to World War II or the Holocaust. A certain counterbalance to this theme is the evocation of motifs of evil present in culture through scenes from films or their characters, such as Lord Vader, characters from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin or from Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films, which are at the same time a historical document and a work of art. There are also motifs taken from the documentation of the activities of the Parisian horror theater Grand Guignol. The artist’s intention is to mix historical themes and those created mainly by filmmakers, where commonly known historical facts meet canonical images borrowed from other works of art, which consequently leads to a certain blurring of the boundaries between the work of art and reality. The main message, however, remains a kind of commentary on current events, although not through current documents but through historical materials, which makes it clear that certain events or people’s behavior towards each other will always recur.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication in the form of a so-called art book, which was intentionally devoid of critical or any other texts. Its format alludes to the appearance of a vinyl record. Reproductions of paintings are not on neutral backgrounds, but are placed on photographs of landscapes from the Central European region. This according to the intuition of the Austrian writer Martin Pollack expressed in his book Tainted Landscapes, due to particularly cruel historical events, is one big graveyard. The book, therefore, is not only a documentation of the artist’s paintings, but connects with the issues of the exhibition complementing it.

Witold Stelmachniewicz (born 1970) – painter, graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow (diploma with distinction), since 1996 he has been a research and teaching employee at the same department of the university, in 2013 he took the position of professor at the Academy of Fine Arts. He has led the Drawing Studio for 11 years now, and the Painting Studio since 2018. He currently serves as Dean of the Faculty of Painting. He is the author of more than a dozen solo exhibitions and has also participated in dozens of group shows at home and abroad, including Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary and Ukraine. He lives and works in Cracow. His works are in the collection of the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow and in private collections at home and abroad.

Exhibition coordinator: Beata Garanty