Layers of Self...how do we really see each other?

About

This work exhibited alongside Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons and Yoko Ono. Dziewulski has been published more than a hundred fifty times in fourteen countries. For his public sculpture in Warsaw, the artist was honoured with the Gold Cross Order of Merit from the Polish Government, which was endorsed by Buckingham Palace.

While photographic portraits depict an instant, Dziewulski tests the limits of painting and sculpture to capture his subjects’ life-force, or their ever-changing motions and emotions. Dziewulski dances between the worlds of figurative representation and abstraction, searching for the elusive essence of his subjects. His “painted digitals” deconstruct visual references, testing just how far interference can go before complete while still maintaining recognition is lost.

In addition to paintings, the exhibition features Dziewulski’s latest sculptural series, Layers of Self, that launched at The Times Centre (The New York Times building) in Manhattan in late 2017. Layers of Self is made with multiple layers of transparent plexiglass, each a canvas for with a painted portrait. When seen while the viewer is walking around the work or from an angle, it creates the illusion of a three-dimensional bust. Thus the work  manifests the nature of people’s characters, which we discover in layers that are built up to create a whole.

Dziewulski, recognised by the Robb Report as one of the world’s top thirty architects, was inspired to deepen his fine art practice when his mother began grappling with Alzheimer’s. “She couldn’t sit still. Both her movements and her personality were a blur. She was a complex, dynamic character. With paint you have this amazing ability to incorporate into the still image the extra dimensions of time and memory.”

This fascination with movement and time has driven and informed all of Dziewulski’s work. Born in London, he received his MA from Cambridge University, and was a Fulbright scholar at Princeton. While running an architecture firm in London and San Francisco for the last 25 years, he has continued to actively engage in the world of fine art – using his painting and sculpture as a means of evolving and refining his architectural designs, and conversely imbuing his art with his own visceral architectural themes. Dziewulski is one of the few international artists invited to exhibit at both the Art and Architecture Biennales in Venice, and the Robb Report voted him one of the Top 30 Architects in the world.

From a sculpture for the Warsaw National War Memorial (for which the Republic of Poland presented him with the Gold Cross Order of Merit and which received a letter of approval from Buckingham Palace), to Asia’s largest indoor sculpture, Dancing Ribbons in Hong Kong, to a collaboration with Mikhail Baryshnikov on San Francisco’s Museum of Performance and Design – the theme of fluid forms constantly changing relative to the perception of the viewer continues to inform every aspect of Dziewulski’s oeuvre.

"Also, I have the dubious honour of being the first artist to have a piece stolen from the Venice Biennale..." -- Mark Dziewulski

This Spring, the artist will also be featured at a solo show in New York City at WhiteBox (9th - 20th July) and by Gallery Palzo at Art Busan (19th - 22nd April), the largest nationwide art festival in Korea. Gallery Palzo will additionally represent Dziewulski's work in at the 17th edition of KIAF International Art Fair in Seoul, Korea (3rd - 7th October) and at Daegu Art Fair in Daegu, Korea (21st - 25th November).