Monika Bobinska is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in London by the Polish artist Karol Radziszewski.
In Radziszewski’s film ‘Painters’, the artist’s camera languidly follows a group of young men renovating the exterior of a communist-era housing estate. The artist’s gaze is homoerotic and voyeuristic, but the camera hints too at the ironies of the heroic ‘Polish worker’ both of communist times and in his more recent incarnation on the building sites of western Europe. There is also reference to the traditionally lowly position of the painter artist in Poland, a position which has changed to one of almost iconic celebrity. The film points a self-referential camera onto the artist himself, whose drawings and murals appear regularly on the walls of public spaces in Poland.
'Painters' has added resonance in the fact that the artist makes the objects of his erotic desires and his voyeurism not the art world and not the subjects sanctioned by conservative Polish society, but instead muscular semi-naked young men. As the critic and curator Lukasz Gorczyca puts it, “Like a typical voyeur, he draws unmediated satisfaction from what he will see, but also from the fact that the view he reveals is not characteristic of how one sees in the local culture. In this way, the act of erotic affirmation, incorporated into Radziszewski’s artistic view, shows its constructive, culture-forming role.”
Karol Radziszewski was born in 1980, and lives and works in Warsaw. A painter, performer and public intervener, he studied painting at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. One of his earliest solo shows was noteworthy for being the first openly gay art exhibition in Poland.
Radziszewski has exhibited widely in Poland, USA, Germany, Holland, Mexico and London. He has had solo exhibitions in Poland’s major public art galleries, The Centre for Contemporary Art Warsaw and Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw.

Monika Bobinska gallery acknowledges the kind support of the Polish Cultural Institute in London in the presentation of this exhibition.

Private view: Thursday 26 March 2009
Artist Talk: Saturday 28 March 2009 at 4pm

The gallery is also open on the first Thursday of each month until 9pm