Monday, 6 May 2013

Avantgarde Queerness

A couple of months ago I walked through Warsaw's National Museum and stopped at this painting.

Ceremonia (Ceremony), 1978








It was huge, at least 2 metres wide, and I wasn't sure whether that smoking dude was a man or a woman. I liked that ambiguity, on top of the work's sharp photo quality. I wrote down the painter's name: Łukasz Korolkiewicz.

Miłość (Love), 1977



Today I dug a little deeper, and of course it turns out that Mr. K was both a precursor of hyper-realism and of overt homoeroticism in Polish art back in the 1970s. I salute both. It feels like I've found the hazy photos of some cool uncle I never had, sharing insights into the seedy mix of Catholicism, greyness and desperate debauchery unique to those times.

Maria (Mary), 1984



Dr Rybicki and Mr Jarłumowicz, 1979



13 December 1981, Morning (1982)

Znużenie (Weariness), 1979
Na zdrowie!

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