PIOTR JANAS

Early Years

Janas studied painting at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts, where he was taught by Jerzy Tchórzewski, a painter, educator, and activist who would significantly influence the direction of Janas’ practice.

Piotr Janas Artworks

Having emerged from the post-1960s and 70s Polish avantgarde, who explored new pathways for Surrealism as an escape from reality, Piotr Janas is interested in the potential of painting to evoke an otherworldly realm whilst considering the way in which the physicality of the medium might conjure associations with real-world materials. The artist has stated: ‘I am interested in the moment of metamorphosis, when the paint is confusingly similar to another substance’.

Early Works

Janas’ palette typically includes fleshy tones and colours with strong emotive or material associations—often relating to the toxic or abject. This is evident in the large oil on canvas painting Slash (2010), which depicts a tubular limb-like form, violently severed with dark red paint dripping from the wound. The disembodied form is framed by dark, brown, amorphous clouds and interrupted by sharp, abstract geometric lines.

Curator Sarah Cosulich Canarutto has written: ’... Janas enacts a metaphorical battle between the formalism of geometry and the instinctive passion of expressionism. The counter collision of figure and form generates ... an interweaving of picture planes and a consequent sense of depth, without establishing a spatial hierarchy’.

Minotaurs

Referencing the monstrous half-human, half-bull creature in Greek mythology, the artist’s 2013 exhibition Minotaurs at Bortolami Gallery in New York explored the realms of the grotesque, post-apocalyptic, sexual, and masculine through a series of large-scale paintings that combined biomorphic forms with painterly gestures reminiscent of abstract expressionism.

Janas’ active, performative handling of the paint and substrate is evident in his energetic, almost violent, gestures, which include wide, sweeping strokes, splatters, and stabbing actions. Janas 6 (2013), a large oil and lacquer on canvas work, fuses sharp geometric forms with more tactile, visceral splashes and drips of paint. Shades of dark purple, red, and blue are muddied with thin washes of ochre, evoking an unsettling, abstract, spaceship-like structure.

Blue is the Decayed Pink

In Blue is the Decayed Pink (2022), Janas’ first solo exhibition at Thomas Erben Gallery in New York, the artist experimented with modes of display. The exhibition included Untitled (2020), a painting that was displayed suspended from the gallery’s ceiling so that both the front and back of the canvas were visible, translating the artist’s bodily approach to painting to the viewer’s experience of the work.

Exhibitions

Piotr Janas has presented in solo and group exhibitions internationally since the early 2000s.

Solo exhibitions include Blue is the Decayed Pink, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York (2022); Minotaurs, Bortolami Gallery, New York (2013); Zet, ziet, żet, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw (2009); From Scherzhauserfeld, Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin (2008).

Group exhibitions include Infinite Painting: Contemporary Painting and Global Realism, Villa Manin Centro d’Arte Contemporanea, Codroipo (2006); Malarstwo polskie XXI wieku (Polish Painting of the 21st Century), Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2006); 50th Venice Biennale (2003).

Collections

Janas’ works are held in international collections including the National Museum in Wroclaw; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; and Tate Modern, London.

Misong Kim | Ocula | 2022