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Piotr Uklański

Midsummer Night’s Dream

December 21, 2011–January 31, 2012
Eden Rock—St. Barths

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Better than Truth), 2011 Pottery, mortar on masonry board and aluminum, 28 × 41 inches (71.1 × 104.1 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Better than Truth), 2011

Pottery, mortar on masonry board and aluminum, 28 × 41 inches (71.1 × 104.1 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (We All Make the Flowers Grow), 2011 Pottery, mortar on masonry board and aluminum, 29 × 41 × 22 inches (73.7 × 104.1 × 55.9 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (We All Make the Flowers Grow), 2011

Pottery, mortar on masonry board and aluminum, 29 × 41 × 22 inches (73.7 × 104.1 × 55.9 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Midnight Creeper), 2011 Pottery, mortar on masonry board and aluminum, 27 × 28 × 17 ½ inches (68.6 × 71.1 × 44.4 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Midnight Creeper), 2011

Pottery, mortar on masonry board and aluminum, 27 × 28 × 17 ½ inches (68.6 × 71.1 × 44.4 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (The Catalogue of Cruelty), 2011 Pottery, mortar on masonry board and aluminum, 26 ½ × 20 ½ × 13 inches (67.3 × 52.1 × 33 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (The Catalogue of Cruelty), 2011

Pottery, mortar on masonry board and aluminum, 26 ½ × 20 ½ × 13 inches (67.3 × 52.1 × 33 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Tragic Magic), 2011 Pottery, mortar on masonry board and aluminum, 60 × 43 ½ × 23 inches (152.4 × 110.5 × 58.4 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Tragic Magic), 2011

Pottery, mortar on masonry board and aluminum, 60 × 43 ½ × 23 inches (152.4 × 110.5 × 58.4 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Fragment of Fear, 2011 Pottery, mortar on masonry board and aluminum, 36 × 25 × 20 inches (68.6 × 76.2 × 45.7 cm)

Piotr Uklański, Fragment of Fear, 2011

Pottery, mortar on masonry board and aluminum, 36 × 25 × 20 inches (68.6 × 76.2 × 45.7 cm)

About

My grandmother did hard labor in a ceramic factory in Communist Poland. This St Barths exhibition would be her Midsummer Night's Dream.
—Piotr Uklański

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new pottery paintings by Piotr Uklański.

Uklański created his first ceramic mosaic in 1999 as a commission for the DT Symk department store in Warsaw—a monumental outdoor installation on three exterior walls of the building, which he covered with an abstract pattern constructed using commercially manufactured ceramic tableware and cement. The resulting mural evoked the aesthetics of Brutalist art and architecture. Uklański's interest in ceramic mosaics was inspired by the use of vernacular pottery for house decoration and public art that was common in post-war Poland. His appropriation of this populist medium is consistent with his ongoing interest in exploring Modernist abstraction through more banal and quotidian materials and gestures. Since then, he has created numerous large-scale ceramic installations-including a thirty-meter long outdoor mural at the Kunsthalle Basel (2004) and a permanent mosaic installation in the tropical gardens surrounding the Museo do Açude in Rio de Janeiro.

In "Midsummer Night's Dream" Uklański has developed these ideas further to produce autonomous "paintings." Each individual ceramic vessel-with the varied styles of glaze, texture, and geometric form-provides him with a "palette" from which he composes his (unpainted) paintings. His sources for the ceramics are deliberately wide-ranging-from unique ceramic sculptures signed by other artists and iconic examples of modernist studio pottery to cheaper, mass-produced tableware and vases. He utilizes recognizable ceramic surfaces such as Pigeon Forge, raku or West German volcanic glazes as painterly tropes in his compositions, relishing the equivalences that are subsequently produced between the craft-based vocabularies and high art clichés of painterly gesture and formalism.

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