Galeria FF - Piotr Wołyński

Instalacja No Discussion

Piotr Wołyński’s individual exhibition called Withdrawal consists of his latest photographic works as well as authorial quasi-photographic forms in which contemporary methods of registering and using images become the object of creative experience. In these realizations Wołyński, addressing various topics, examines the influence of photography and film on the ways in which we produce and arrange meanings and on what, consequently, we focus, in a way becoming one with our photographic or video cameras.
In the 1990s Piotr Wołyński wrote in one of his texts: “Photography easily and interchangeably uses two kinds of space: the real space which is recorded, registered, and the space do the image. In the context of the world which is saturated with images and in which there is not enough space anymore in which to separate them, they become transparent.” However, the author is far from the metaphor of the “disappearing reality” which was fashionable at that time. Wołyński avoids the repetition of this proposition and of the process that is connected with it. Looking at his art – in which the question about the status of the image in the contemporary info-sphere undoubtedly occupies an important place – one can come to the conclusion that images dominate in the onset of a process that leads perhaps not to the disappearance, but to the withdrawal of reality. The exhibition, presented simultaneously in two galleries: the FF Gallery and the Imaginarium Gallery, among other works contains the following:

the series of photographs called Freaks (2012), devoted to the contemporary state of statues and of the spaces around them;
the series of photo-montages called Emulation (2011) in which the author using the images of St. Edith Stein considers the problem of imitating as a phenomenon deeply rooted in our physical, biological, psychological and most of all, spiritual nature;
an installation called When You Connect…, devoted to the photographic act as the practice of concentrating one’s attention and arranging one’s impressions. The work is based on the author’s filmic and photographic account of a certain event in St. Peter’s Square in Rome;
an installation entitled No Discussion (2010) which refers to a specific feeling that overcame the author in April 2010 when he was wandering around in public spaces used to manifest or commemorate certain values;
an interactive installation Eye to Eye (2009) and the accompanying photographs which to a large extent were produced in collaboration with the viewers.

Installation Eye to Eye

Piotr Wołyński
Creative photographer since the end of the 1970s. Not only an artist, he writes about art and was a curator of many exhibitions. Since 1985 he has been teaching at the Artistic University (formerly Academy of Art) in Poznań and is currently running his own workshop. He is a Professor, the head of the Department of Photography at the Artistic University in Poznań.

Selected individual exhibitions:
Übermacht und Reaktion, Barockfabrik, Aachen, Germany (1983);
Photographs, the FF Gallery, Łódź (1992);
Transparency, the FF Gallery, Łódź (1994);
Apotropeions, Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions, Wrocław (2003);
Ausgewählte Fotographien, Kunst – Und Kulturzentrum Monschau, Germany (2005);
Forms and Despiteforms, Stanisław Staszic Museum, Piła (2008);
Eye to Eye, the PF Gallery, Poznań (2009);
When You Connect…, the Rotunda Gallery, Poznań (2011).