The 15th February 2011 Massimo De Carlo opens Piotr, Piotr Uklański’s solo exhibition. For the first time in Europe the artist presents a series of new works on canvas inspired to the “tie and dye”, an old painting technique in which the penetration of colour on fabric depends on the knots made in the canvas.

Piotr Uklański experiments on different formats, techniques and mediums. This new set of works reflects on the meaning of painting and on the gestures that lie beneath this process: in general we intend the act of painting as the application of pigments on a surface to produce signs and figures; in this case, instead, attention is drawn to decolorization rather than saturation, the bleaching of certain parts of colour, through chemical reactions of liquids applied to the canvas. The different shades, obtained by the artist’s gesture and from the different diffusion of the liquid, create and retrace in a different way the exemplar themes treated by the author: the landscape, suns, eyes and monochromatic backgrounds.

Polish artist, born in 1968 in Warsaw, Piotr Uklański has established himself in the international art scene in the second half of the 1990’s with strong and effective works, in which references to the history of art and social issues are merged together. The artist uses several different mediums, including photography, painting, sculpture and video, but also disparate subjects such as in the photographic series Untitled (The Nazis), 1998, which reproduces the faces of American actors dressed up as Nazis, or in the photograph Untitled (Ioannes Paulus PP.II Karol Wojtyla), 2004, which became one of the symbolic images during the commemorations for the Pope’s death.