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Piotr Uklański

Discharge!

January 12–February 19, 2011
980 Madison Avenue, New York

Piotr Uklański: Discharge! Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge!

Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge! Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge!

Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge! Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge!

Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge! Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge!

Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge! Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge!

Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge! Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge!

Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge! Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge!

Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge! Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge!

Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge! Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge!

Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge! Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge!

Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge! Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge!

Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge! Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

Piotr Uklański: Discharge!

Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

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Works Exhibited

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Orgasmatron), 2010 Fiber-active dye on oxidized cotton textile stretched over cotton canvas, 95 ¾ × 94 inches (243.2 × 238.8 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Orgasmatron), 2010

Fiber-active dye on oxidized cotton textile stretched over cotton canvas, 95 ¾ × 94 inches (243.2 × 238.8 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Jupiter Glow, 2010 Fiber-active dye on oxidized cotton textile stretched over cotton canvas, 61 ⅜ × 75 inches (155.9 × 190.5 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Jupiter Glow, 2010

Fiber-active dye on oxidized cotton textile stretched over cotton canvas, 61 ⅜ × 75 inches (155.9 × 190.5 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Picante, 2010 Fiber-active dye on oxidized cotton textile stretched over cotton canvas, 97 × 93 ¾ inches (246.4 × 238.1 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Picante, 2010

Fiber-active dye on oxidized cotton textile stretched over cotton canvas, 97 × 93 ¾ inches (246.4 × 238.1 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Atomic Ovum), 2010 Fiber-active dye on oxidized cotton textile stretched over cotton canvas, 88 ⅞ × 93 ¾ inches (225.7 × 238.1 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Atomic Ovum), 2010

Fiber-active dye on oxidized cotton textile stretched over cotton canvas, 88 ⅞ × 93 ¾ inches (225.7 × 238.1 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Tropical Floral), 2010 Fiber-active dye on oxidized cotton textile stretched over cotton canvas, 89 ¾ × 89 ¼ inches (226.1 × 226.7 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Tropical Floral), 2010

Fiber-active dye on oxidized cotton textile stretched over cotton canvas, 89 ¾ × 89 ¼ inches (226.1 × 226.7 cm)

About

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present Discharge!, a mise-en-scène of new paintings by Piotr Uklański.

If painting is traditionally defined as an accretive practice whereby pigments are applied to blank canvas to produce marks, Uklański’s new work moves in the opposite direction. The process reveals a skepticism towards the act of painting that at the same time allows him to produce seductive pictorial results. Color is strategically removed — or discharged — from cotton bedsheets that have been saturated with vibrantly-hued fiber-reactive dyes. Bleach is the primary agent in this process that allows the creation of “paintings” without paint.

The nature of this discharge method aligns this work with a legacy of anti-painting. Sharing affinities with Sigmar Polke’s fabric paintings and Blinky Palermo’s sewn cloth pictures (Stoffbilder) — Uklański abandons paint while engaging the histories of abstraction, conceptual art, and pop culture. While Polke and Palermo shopped together for their materials at the Karstadt department store in Cologne, Uklański sources his fabrics at Ikea and Bloomingdales.

His recuperation of tie-dyeing into the realm of “serious painting” suggests an irreverence towards mainstream modernism while he explains his approach as emerging in part from his position as an immigrant in the city that gave rise to Abstract Expressionism: “Neither English nor abstraction is my mother tongue. These paintings ‘speak’ an aesthetic ESL.”

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