Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, September 3, 2021: Przemek Pyszczek, a Polish-Canadian emerging artist (#1355)

Przemek Pyszczek (1985) Polish-born, raised in Canada and now living in Berlin. He obtained his Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University of Manitoba in 2007. Through architecturally inspired sculptures, installations and paintings, Pyszczek’s work traces Poland’s transition since the fall of the Iron Curtain and also serves as an ongoing journey to rediscover his own pastdraws upon his training in architecture and his personal history for his cerebral, understated sculptures, installations, and paintings. Born in Poland, he moved to Canada with his family, only returning to his birthplace a handful of times while growing up. The feelings of displacement and connection that these visits evoked in him shaped his outlook and approach to art. He now visits Poland regularly, where he studies and photographs the Soviet-era housing blocks that inform much of his work. He describes these structures as “part of my personal history and part of my memory, but also part of the fabric of history.” In one of his series, Pyszczek transformed their decorated facades into paintings, featuring fragments of their colorful, graphic designs overlaid with the patterned metal grating typically found on balconies and over windows.

In his works, Pyszczek scrutinizes the collective aesthetic landscape of post-transformation Poland. His geometric, radiant compositions subvert the inexorable binding between form and content: by adopting aesthetics specific to socialist architecture into a different medium – from a block façade painting to an artwork itself – Pyszczek brings to the fore the personal, memorable qualities of the forms he deploys. The visual landscape of a post-transformation state in his practice becomes more of a memoryscape, overwritten with constructed childhood memories, whose tissue are manifold colors: those of primary school corridors, local gymnasiums, overly optimistic children clinics. Simplified forms and vivid colours that once carried ideological overtones, in Pyszczek’s works are transformed into their own abstractions, decontextualized and reorganised so as to enable the viewer to indulge themselves in visual nostalgia, both experienced and constructed.

This disconnection is striking, yet not total. The conscious imitation of visual idioms of block architecture and artist blacksmithing of window grates results in a fabrication of ostalgie, a term denoting longing for the communist past of the Eastern Bloc. Through hyperbolization of socialist aesthetics, Pyszczek achieves a sense of shared memory which belongs to no one: a para sentiment for what might not have been experienced, but remains alluring thanks to its construction – either social or aesthetic, or maybe, as Pyszczek seems to suggest, both.

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