Konrad Ziółkowski
Konrad Ziółkowski was born in Strzelin, Poland, in 1981. He grew up in a family with artistic traditions. During his secondary school years, he created his own compositions and carried out commercial commissions. In 2001, he began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. During his studies, he also took part in the creation and organization of festivals, exhibitions, as well as artistic and multimedia shows. He was a member of the informal art group “El Nino”. In 2006, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts with the highest distinction in the sculpture studio of Professor Zbigniew Makarewicz. He currently works in contemporary and classical sculpture, multimedia, computer graphics, and animation. Whenever Ziółkowski begins creating a sculpture, he imagines someone real — a living person. A person, a figure endowed with personality traits, in a certain mood or performing a specific action: looking around, thinking about something, remaining static or moving dynamically. He always imagines a specific person. It is like a single frame from a longer film he has in his mind, in which this figure plays a role. Later comes the time for synthesis, followed by the metamorphosis of all the details that suit and define this person. Lorelei, a beautiful young woman with fair skin and blue eyes, wearing a navy-blue dress, turns her head away in embarrassment when a man asks... Borint is that kind of man — strong, athletic, fashionable. He is a man holding an invisible thread with a weight at the end of it, the so-called “hold the line.” He takes care of his figure, of his “line”; he is “perfect in comparison with others,” without preserving their shape. The interpretation of anatomy and its variability, expressed through solid, sharp edges, plays an important role in Ziółkowski’s work. He has a particular fascination with sharp edges, which create the line he had been searching for for a long time. Drawing is equally important. He does not think he could create a sculpture anymore without a specific drawing. It gives him an additional possibility to divide the mass, something that brings him genuine satisfaction. Drawing allows him to express a different impression and becomes the final detail. Often, in relation to a simple solid form, drawing creates the final image of the sculpture, as in the work POSTHEAD, where simple volumes were completed by drawing and by their further division into other shapes. Colour is another essential element. After all, it is impossible to create a transparent, invisible sculpture. There is always some colour. And if there is colour, Ziółkowski believes it should contribute something; it should create a new space or define something important, such as the context of our thoughts, as suggested in the sculpture Flosig I. Inside her head there is an openwork element in a distinctive colour — perhaps her thoughts are green? This sculpture is thinking about a question someone has asked, and she will answer, but she only needs to think it through...
Ziółkowski does not want to create difficult scenes dealing with subjects such as the meaning of life or, even worse, death in human existence — for him, that becomes a kind of nightmare. He prefers to break down simple emotions, gestures, and behaviours into their basic elements. Everything that makes up a sculpture is extremely important to him: form, shapes, drawing, colour, and composition. He spends many days, and sometimes weeks, working on these elements in order to create the living figure he had first seen in his imagination. Yet he is not fully satisfied. He has shape, colour, and drawing at his disposal — wonderful — but he still feels that something is missing. In 2006, during the defence of his master’s diploma, his post-Cubist busts were displayed in one room, while he and the professors were in another. They questioned him — in a constructive way — wanting to understand more, while his problems, or rather an entire set of them, were located in a third room. In that third room stood a post-Cubist figure in relation to a film projected onto a screen that had a human form. There were several issues he wanted to explore, but one was the most important to him: FILM. Film became the final ingredient he felt was missing when creating sculptures — unfortunately, something he still believes has not yet been fully captured. He imagines living material, for example clay, which has no fixed colour but becomes animation, a film that can be created and transformed: a bust turning into fading mist, flowing water, shifting sand... For Ziółkowski, that possibility would be wonderful.
