Rafał Sobiczewski: warning! you are infected!!!

The exhibition of Rafał Sobiczewski’s work is another presentation at Atlas Sztuki of an artist associated with Łódź. Rafał Sobiczewski, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź and now an assistant professor there, remains outside the artistic mainstream. This is undoubtedly a conscious choice by the artist, who says in an engaging conversation with Piotr Grobliński: ‘A painting usually takes several months to make. […] A finished painting possesses its own energy, life and radiance. For that to happen, a certain amount of work must be performed. The time spent before the painting becomes enchanted within it, allowing the canvas to become an image. […] If the material resists, the work has a chance of being credible, although that resistance can be painful.’

According to Magdalena Wicherkiewicz, author of an essay about the artist’s work, he places ‘an equals sign between the bodily and spiritual aspects of existence’. She observes that ‘there is something difficult in Sobiczewski’s painting that makes us experience a kind of unbearable anguish, the painful authenticity of painterly gesture and thought. Looking at his paintings causes almost physically perceptible pain and torment, although at the same time we sense a trace of a particular tenderness towards the figures depicted.’

I also encourage you to read Łukasz Zaorski-Sikora’s essay on Rafał Sobiczewski’s work. The author emphasises that ‘the artist approaches his practice in a decidedly intuitive manner, while painting itself is, in this case, a process—a ceaseless struggle with material, but also with conventional forms of communication that constrain us’.

This catalogue differs from those published previously: it is the work of Remigiusz Wojaczek, who together with Rafał Sobiczewski and three other artists forms the Human Ex group.

I invite everyone to visit Atlas Sztuki and see the results of the artist’s struggle with material.