Filip Rybkowski: A Theory of Clouds

Filip Rybkowski’s solo exhibition takes as its starting point World War I and the artist’s stance towards it. Rybkowski is primarily interested in the cultural and artistic consequences of the conflict from the first part of the 20^th century as well as their long-term impact: the fragmentation, dismemberment and de-familiarisation of the body and the experiencing of historical and social reality, modern crises of representation and masculinity, as well as post-war attempts at a return to order, with fascist overtones.

In his hallmark manner, Rybkowski evokes and re/deconstructs classical works and modernist and avant-garde exhibition situations, recreating and transforming the anxiety predicament of the modern-era subject. Engaged in a metamodernist dialogue with Marcel Duchamp, Marsden Hartley, Claude Monet, Władysław Strzemiński and Witkacy, he constructs a series of aesthetic displacements and temporal translocations. With their help, he focuses the audience’s attention as much on the post-war reality of a century ago as on the 2020s – the period in which we all live, whether we like it or not.

The title of the exhibition is a paraphrase of Hubert Damisch’s book A Theory of /Cloud/. Clouds are a key category structuring the narrative of the exhibition. Rybkowski is interested in the figure of the cloud, borrowed from Damisch, which symbolises otherness and introduces ambiguity into artistic representation, as well as in various images of actual clouds, evoked several times in the exhibition. Last but not least, the cloud – taken to mean a cluster of images – is a handy metaphor that can be used to aptly describe both the collection and the structure of the various works by the artist that the exhibition comprises.

Filip Rybkowski (born 1991) – visual artist, graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, co-founder of the Piana Gallery Foundation. In his artistic practice, he uses the critical act of (re)construction combined with reflection on the political nature of gestures of restoration, reproduction and conservation. In his intermedia he employs a variety of media, from painting (including stained glass and mosaic), drawing, photography and objets trouvés, to sculpture and installation. The artist’s hallmarks are the poetics of the fragment and the palimpsest, ubiquitous quotations and pseudo-quotations, and visual re/deconstruction of original artefacts, events and situations. His works have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, Trafo Trafostacja Sztuki in Szczecin, Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery in Kraków, Kode Art Museum in Bergen, and Krakauer Haus in Nuremberg. In 2024, he received the main award in the Krupa Art Foundation Young Art Prize competition. He comes from Szczecin and lives and works in Kraków.