Maciej Salamon Housework
01.02 – 11.04.2021 Maciej Salamon Housework
curator: Magda Kardasz
cooperation Monika Kopczewska
In the summer of this special year, Maciek Salamon said, ‘When the pandemic came, it turned out that out of the things I’d been doing so far, I couldn’t (or didn’t have to) do anything. And so, after many years, I remembered that I like painting.’1
Salamon — a graduate of and currently a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk — has mainly been involved in drawing, graphic art and graphic design, creating animated films and music videos, as well as music. He has also been an artistic life organiser and co-publisher of a magazine within the Krecha artistic group, curator of Gablotka Gallery, a tattoo artist and the co-founder of a cooperative that runs, among other things, a café club. According to him, academic education suppressed the natural pleasure he took from painting and it was only the strange time of the pandemic lockdown that reminded him of this. It was then that he came up with the idea of establishing the M. Salamon Portrait company, directly referencing the famous portrait company of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, inaugurated in 1928. Salamon openly expresses his admiration for Witkacy’s work, so his undertaking can be treated as a kind of humorous homage to an older colleague. Witkiewicz wrote, ‘This year, I am showing only portraits, because no one appreciates, needs or buys my compositions, and the critics are either silent about them or write unimportant things, sometimes even nonsense, about them. A portrait can be as much a work of Pure Form as a landscape, still life, or composition — it can be, but these days, it usually is not.’
In Salamon’s case, the idea of establishing such a company was born out of also a desire to fill up the free time that as was a ‘gift’ from the pandemic (a kind of self-ironic art therapy) and from the need to support his family. In the metaphorical sense, his project is a bittersweet commentary on the economic situation of the modern day artist left to fend for himself in the difficult times of the plague.


Maciej Salamon
Housework
01.02 – 11.04.2021
Zachęta Project Room
ul. Gałczyńskiego 3, 00-362 Warsaw
See on the map
Godziny otwarcia:
tuesday–Sunday 12–8 p.m.
free entry