Piotr Łakomy
“Łakomy’s works can be viewed as a contaminated landscape, marked by a central void around which objects-sculptures gravitate,”1 Dorota Michalska writes. The artist’s sculptures, assemblages, and interventions owe their physicality and particular texturality to the materials used: fragments of found objects, massive semi-products with drilled holes, and sometimes fragile, barely hardened raw materials that can be connected with another substance, imperfectly sealing the connecting edges of so different elements. Their rawness is due to a monochromatic tonality, a cool, and sometimes warmer, palette, as a result of which they take on a “fleshy” hue. They also seem to be suspended between life and death, sometimes through the fact of using organic materials, such as oyster egg shells; at other times they are interventions that blend in with the background, using, for example, stucco marmo (marmorization). This integration of matter with background is also interesting in the context of the methods of presentation, whereby the objects may be displayed high overhead or, alternatively, very low above the floor, where the assemblages’ bottom edges nearly touch it. The very process of their construction often provides for the application of human scale, with Łakomy referencing the height of Le Corbusier’s Modulor Man (183 cm). In the case of the exhibited works, we are dealing rather with fragments of the body – photographic frames from the waist down.
Łakomy’s works are shown next to a painting by Erna Rosenstein, Cosmonaut Memorial (1973), which was presented in the 8th Golden Grape and is today in the collection of the Lubusz Land Museum, and a work by Henryk Morel, Composition (1966), from the collection of the National Museum in Poznań. The former can be interpreted in relation to the era’s keen interest in space exploration. The latter consists of a number of black connected metal and rubber elements, and resembles an object he presented in the exhibition space and Expression (3rd Golden Grape, 1967).
– Piotr Łakomy, Little Garden or 4VVGMZRN10MG, 2020, ca. 54 × 43 cm
– Piotr Łakomy, Uncut Conduit (Umbilical Cord), 2020, ca. 113 × 86 cm
– Henryk Morel, Composition, 1966, National Museum in Poznań
– Erna Rosenstein, Cosmonaut Memorial, 1973, Lubusz Land Museum
Lubusz Land Museum, Nowy Wiek Gallery
Piotr Łakomy (b. 1983) studied in the Faculty of Arts of the University of Zielona Góra in 2003-2008, graduating in 2009 in the class of Leszek Knaflewski. He has participated in (and co-curated) numerous exhibitions, including at the Avant-Garde Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, or the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, all in Warsaw, among other venues. His works are held in many institutional and private collections. His plan for the nearest future is to continue his work.
1 Dorota Michalska, A Contaminated Landscape: Piotr Łakomy’s Post-Objects, Skala Gallery, 2020, http://galeriaskala.com/en/przez-zebra-through-the-ribs/.