ARTUR ŻMIJEWSKI

Artur Żmijewski—born in 1966. He studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in the studios of Gustaw Zemła and Grzegorz Kowalski. Known as a filmmaker and photographer with a peculiar imagination, full of mutilated figures, human hybrids or sad black flowers. A borderline artist, an inhabitant of the periphery, where colours fade and photographs turn into sacred icons. 

 

It was Żmijewski who stripped the soldiers of the Representative Company of the Polish Army naked to film them in parade drill poses. It was Żmijewski who renewed the camp number of the Auschwitz prisoner. But it was also he who, with understanding and a kind of medical tenderness, leaned over disabled people whose gait and speech were distorted by their illnesses—filming them as they walked, stood up or lay down. These simple depictions of the human body moved some viewers to tears. It was also Żmijewski who filmed the mutilated soldiers recklessly sent by the Russian government to various fronts, from which they returned without arms or legs. 

 

These cinematic studies by Żmijewski contrast with his tender photographs, which depict the human body in a gentle and beautiful way, full of compassion and empathy. Some of his photographs show sleeping people, others colourful flowers or dolls. It is difficult to say that his work is cheerful, but it is certainly full of depictions of 'the most poignant moments of the human condition'. In his photographs, Żmijewski relies on a melancholy mood, often interrupted by the beauty of the models he captures. Photographs of plants are also part of Żmijewski's oeuvre—black-and-white or colour hybrids of plants, herbariums, dry, dead and living flowers mix in his photographic collages.

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Yes, Żmijewski is a master of mood—the artist's photographic images place the viewer at a crossroads between nostalgia and horror. They are intriguing as sensual figures made from the ashes of Pompeii, seemingly disintegrated and crushed by volcanic slag, yet retaining the full physical formation of a living body. One is tempted to recall this passage by K. Wierzyński, a poem that speaks of a certain necessary sadness of nature: “Rotten leaves, forest despair, hawthorn, and the stink of the smoky bonfires in the field, / Empty, deserted, abandoned roads, not knowing where they lead or come from. / In the air with screaming crows, the painful sunset. / Closer and closer to the fog. Empty, deserted. / Untraced grief, suddenly felt, sharp and bottomless.”