Andrzej Zieliński

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Andrzej Zieliński

Andrzej Zieliński

Biography

Born: Kansas City, MO
Current Residence: Berlin, Germany

Zielinski’s images of machines include: laptops, scanners and camcorders. Zielinski paints machines we use daily to communicate to each other with and reminds us that painting is also a form of communication. Zielinski’s paintings have no straight or perfect angles, which is at odds with a conventional machine aesthetic. The wrong angles and wrong proportions of Zielinski’s vibrant machines contribute to a comedy that speaks to how machines appearance change but the functionality has not. The bright colours are both happy and harsh, creating a strange, unsettling and engaging paradox. Most people experience the world mediated by a technological device that is flat and Zielinski’s reverses this by making paintings that are deceptively flat from a distance, but up close are full of relief that seems to grow from the painting out to the viewer. It beckons the viewer to ‘interface’ with painting. Each painting becomes a single event and therefore a single personality. Zielinski uses new advances in acrylic paints: modelling paste, gels and interference colour to update painting. These new acrylics speak to the plastic age we live in. The backgrounds in the paintings look like waves and reference Wi-Fi radio waves and heat dissipation.

Zielinski’s paintings reference still life, portrait and icon painting genres but do not sit squarely in any one category. This mirrors how technologically performs multiple functions. For example: is a camera a phone? Or is the phone a camera-phone or camcorder? Zielinski alludes to the breakdown of traditional nomenclature and the exacerbation of it. Zielinski has created paintings, sculptures and prints that speak to the past, present and future.

His work is in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Canberra Museum and Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Australia and private collections around the globe. His work has been shown in New York City, Los Angeles, Berlin, Tokyo, Sydney and Dubai. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Artist Statement

Sleeved Laptop, 2015

I often think very materially about how the device I’m depicting functions and this helps lead me to new solutions. I chose a paper with a colour to it. This print of a shiny whitish laptop encloses the screen space causing the actual paper to glow and radiate. What’s happening in the screen is up to debate—a ‘crash’ or perhaps we’re viewing something on the outer edges of our solar system? The computer feels paradoxically light and heavy, clunky and refined, random and structured. The activated brushstrokes in the background seem to be sending waves of information or dissipating heat from a computer processing an overload of data. The computer itself feels like it is both fading and appearing in its translucent ephemeral state. Screen Saver, 2015

This image resembles some notion of a laptop with the screen turned away from the viewer. Is it hiding something? The back of the screen faces the viewer with a staccato rhythm of horizontal bands of black and white that calls to mind the binary circulatory system of one’s and zero’s which is the lingua franca of communication devices. The back seems to be expandable like an accordion or a venetian blind, suggesting pliancy and also evoking a presence that is quite ‘shield-like’ at the same time. The screen itself is not viewable, however an aura of lavender suggests that it’s ‘on’.

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