Uncategorized – wanda gallery

construction scaffold, metal, safety and technical nets, plastic, styrodur, gypsum, pe foam, plaster, glue, acrylic, dimensions variable

A construction inspired by the shape of a loom, on which is stretched a form made of joined pieces of technical mesh. This substrate covers both building sites and buildings condemend for demolition. Its dual nature reflects the need to map the state between building and deconstruction, producing new content and erasing meaning.

Patryk Staruch (b. 1999), is a Polish painter exploring the parallel of urban topography and the complexity of the human psyche, while highlighting the myth- making role of film and photography. His art practice has traces of autobiography blurred by cultural stratifications. Fascinated by the French New Wave, he analyze the constraints and pitfalls of everyday life, using flanerism as the main method of telling about the urban and social relations. Night has a significant role in his paintings, representing the time when it’s easiest to face yourself or the other person, allowing an escape from the daytime attention deficit.

“In his paintings, Patryk Staruch touches upon the psychoanalytical background of the cinema. He uses cinematic narrative and compositional strategies, when recreating scenes from his own memories and dreams. Aware of the power of the patriarchal gaze as well as both male and female gaze shaped by the cinema, he reflects on how his female protagonists see themselves and others and, what’s the most important, how they wish to be seen? In his painting Sleepwalker (2023), the artist makes a reinterpretation of the cinematic montage. The black outline of the girl’s face with her eyes closed suggests that the scene in the background – evocative of Kate Bush’s music video for Wuthering heights – may be a dreamlike projection of her. But it could also be an image formed by someone else, gazing at her. Is she the one who dreams, or is the person looking at her dreaming about her?

Staruch’s paintings are like the movie frames which, though seemingly unconnected, form a narrative sequence, a proof of randomness of life itself. The large-format canvases are grounded in reality, but differ from it by their unsettling atmosphere of strangeness. It’s like it was a never-made Lynch’s movie filled with the heroines of Antonioni and Godard. And as if everything was from a dream that we can’t exactly recall. Perhaps this is because the artist looks at the world like a flâneur, suspended between involvement and distance. He is more of an observer rather than the lead character, leaving the stage to the continuously evolving images of his imagination, which their hypnotic and puzzling effect. For the artist, the cinema becomes a medium that brings him closer to reality.” *

2024

Glancing is a Form of Contact, group exhibition at wanda gallery, Warsaw
The Sharp Smell of Flowers, group exhibition at Krupa Art Foundation, Wrocław

2023

46th Bielska Jesień Painting Biennale 2023, group exhibition at BWA Bielsko-Biała
Greetings from Wolska Street, group exhibition at Turnus Gallery, Warsaw
Golden Hour, group exhibition at Piana Gallery, Kraków
777, group exhibition at AOKZ Gallery, Łódź

2022

It looked somewhat different, duo exhibition at Piana Gallery, Kraków
2×7, group exhibition at Solvay Center for Contemporary Art, Kraków