I Am Asked about Nothing

About

The multifaceted and diverse use of media in Andrzej Dłużniewski’s oeuvre escapes any obvious classification. His involvement in the neo-avant-garde movement, the conceptualization of his art, his affinity to Fluxus and above all – the scope of his artistic output (both in the field of visual arts and the written word) are clear. His body of work includes paintings, drawings, photographs, collages, sculptures, art objects, spatial installations, and even performance art. In his works, he often combined objects, images, and words, using them to both specify and differentiate each other. He deconstructed and redefined the concept of a painting in a series of works in Image of an Absent Picture (1978), reached the point of absurdity by using multiple, clustered configurations of words in Painting, Replica, Copy (1978), and demonstrated the different variants of a painting in 22 Figurative Pictures (1979) using a series of self portraits within a frame of a non-existent painting. He maintained a sense of humor when it came to the expectations of the art viewer, and was able to remove the viewer’s certainty by posing questions about the relationship between the meaning of words, their grammatical gender and their variations in other languages. By assigning color to gender, he explored the less-obvious relationship between the meaning of images and words, as well as their gender and colors.