The exhibition presents around 40 works by František Kowolowski, set within a fictional depot space. Kowolowski employs various artistic techniques in his creative efforts – painting, video art, photography, and installation. This allows visitors to get an idea of the author’s intermedial approach. The exhibition Depositum showcases Kowolowski’s work from the last eleven years with references reaching into the past. His multimedia expression oscillates between transient forms and installations that manifest in early disappearance, and a living, undeniable ephemeral structure of performance. The connection of physicality, space, time, and the impermanence of these elements is also evident in the artist’s large canvases. As an artist and performer, he often works with the tension born between the suggested and the revealed. His aim is to lead the visitor to question conventional ways of thinking about the rules of the game, not only in art but in any system. Order and chaos are easily interchangeable entities in his works. Kowolowski’s art has its roots in constructivism, which gave rise, for example, to El Lissitzky’s Abstract Cabinets. The exhibition is complemented by an authorial catalog reflecting Kowolowski’s work over the past decade.

Tomáš Knoflíček

František Kowolowski (born 1967) studied at the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Brno and later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In addition to his creative activities, he is involved in curatorial work and critical as well as theoretical publishing. He teaches at the Faculty of Arts at Ostrava University and the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology. He regularly participates in symposia and exhibits his works in the Czech Republic and abroad (Sweden, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Slovakia, Croatia, Italy, and others).

Translated with the help of GPT chat.

Curator: Tomáš Knoflíček