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Artist Statement:
FINISHED WITH DISTINCTION
ACADEMY OF FINE ART IN WARSAW,
WORKING IN WARSAW, EXHIBITING
PAINTINGS AND VIDEO
INSTALLATION NOT ONLY IN
EUROPA...
Further Information
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Artist Exhibitions:
The major one-men shows and
collective exhibitions:
1965 post-competition
exhibition, Gramercy Park, New
York,
distinction.1967 Second
Biennale of spatial forms,
Elblag, Gallery "El".
1968 Gallery "Bogucki",
Warsaw, Grand Opera House.
1969 "Ved Aen"
Gallery, Aarhus. "Atheneum"
Gallery, Copenhagen. 1971
"Trasa M-Z",
Warsaw, National Museum. 1972
Tenner ...
Further Information
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Collections:
Coming Soon!
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Reviews for Janusz Mulak:
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L'ART CONTEMPORAIN POLONAIS &<8211; Catalogue Galerie Espace-Temps, Paris, 1989
In the beginning of the seventies the artist was interested in the sphere of
the environment. The paintings being composed at this time were abstract
where he decisively challenged a traditional form. He used to oppose
glittering surfaces painted on aluminum with the big surfaces covered by
narrow strips of colorful, unpolished materia. Those two types of areas were
cut by fissure whereas the light filters through.
At the same time he proposed action in open nature while being convinced
that the observation and the artistic action in natural space releases "the
spiritual reaction of unity and identity with nature".
Later on, at the end of the seventies he returns to the conventional method
of painting the picture on flat surface. At first, in the series of works on
canvas, he is close in methods and style to hyperrealism. The architecture in
its reshaping or its fragments: doors, destroyed windows and leprosy-walls
create the urban picture, imposing a reflection of the poverty of human
existence in those surroundings.
Three paintings of the Messiah series continue this reflection in a deeper
dimension through its importance and greatness. The Messiah figure always
appears in the middle of the lower part of the composition. It is surrounded
by two kinds of elements, geometrical or amorphous, localized in the middle of
the composition. The expression of chaos is composed by the form abstract in
its nature. At the same time the form is associated with the real image of a
dark courtyard and the wall of the house seen in the perspective de sotto
insu.
Blue, cool and warm colours stimulate the contradiction between the natural
and supernatural, between the reality and miracle. The question is
whether the Messiah is willing to save and in what kind of the world he wants
to introduce the Law and the Order.
Barbara Askanas Department Custodian of Modern Art, National Museum in
Warsaw
WARSZAWA CENTRALNA - PLATFORM NUMBER ONE
The video by Janusz Mulak is a unique work of Polish contemporary art It is not a shallow provocation, a composition aimed at calling out a strong, but short and superficial shake; this fragment of reality really
wanders throughout the fields of our memory long after the presentation
and gives the creeps, when you think of it more intensively.
"Warszawa Centralna - Platform Number One" evokes Samuel Beckett's
"Endgame": A man dies on our bare eyes. A young man, a beautiful man, a
sensitive man, a talented poet and an illustrator. He lies rapped up in
rags on a railway station; not unveiled on the platform, but on the
recesses of waiting rooms, where the homeless, nameless, people with no
future and no past "hit their sacks"; junkies, outcasts, renegades, all
unable and unwilling to challenge life.
Chris - a well-educated man, took uppers at university. Then he met a
girl, fell in love, got married, ran a family business, quit narcotics.
Then she died in a car crash leaving him with the children.
Chris saw light in drinking. Not long after that, did drugs and hit the
streets again. Got the nickname 'Jesus'. Those photos are not arranged -
he was real. And now he's dead. Nobody offers help on the stations. Nobody hopes to get it. Nobody
interferes... .
How long was he there ? How long was he waiting for death ? Nobody
knows. It was too late, when Janusz Mulak found him.
The montage is based on a series of static, slowly changing photographs,
which, as a form of an artistic expression, imperceptibly enforce the
viewer to interact with what he sees. We are touching someone's tragic
destiny and asking together with the artist whether it has to have
happened so. The whole projection places the viewer face to face with
two major questions: Is it the man choosing his fate or the fate
executing a sentence? Is a man's free will just an illusion?
&<8221;ART&<8221; red.Joanna Skoczylas
DAGENS NYHETER 24-07-1988, STOCKHOLM, Poland at the Town Hall
Mulak belongs to the most outstanding Polish artists; his works are to be numbered among the most interesting ones of that exhibition. Mulak achieves his intended effects using mixed techniques. He mixes acrylic with oil paints thus obtaining both lusters and matts. His painting entitled "Foto" gives an example of talent and taste in his painting.
The house front seems to be unsteady, plasters are falling off; this impression is enhanced by the very painting technique as well as by building the form in a specific manner of jagged rhythms. A butterfly suddenly appears on the trunk of a naked woman, it fell there from a strange garden.
The whole matter of that painting is uniform and can denote a strain of collapse. But vitality of pure and intense colours gives an impression of beauty of the matter itself and of pictorial art as such. The fundamental, however, is the impression as if the painting were composed of torn apart rugged butterfly
ings; as if a mask consisting of butterfly wings were superposed on to various parts of the painting in different combinations. Karin Bellman
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