Bartek Buczek

Bartek Buczek (b. 1987 in Czechowice-Dziedzice) is a painter and - as he himself emphasises - a second-hand bookseller, art handler and curator. A scholar of the National Children's Fund, he completed painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, defending his diploma in the studio of Andrzej Tobis (2011). He was a member of the Ośmiornica group, and in his early period - through the circle of Tobis's students - he remained under the influence of the legendary Ładnie group.

Buczek creates monochrome series of paintings and moves within conceptual painting, in which reality is an essential clue to interpretation. He describes himself as „a realist tired of reality” and keeps a clear, ironic distance towards his own work. In his works - including those that go beyond the frame of the picture - there is a perceptible melancholy atmosphere of the focused reader and the pensive detective, patiently „plotting” almost-real stories on the canvas and on the pages of books.

His practice readily reaches for what is usually invisible in the art world. Working as an art handler, installer and arranger, since 2020 he has created „panegyric” works devoted to his favourite tools of the trade, has co-organised the Symposium of the Technical Staff and runs the art-handler-run space „Art Industry Standard” - making the subject of art its own back-stage and technical support.

He has exhibited since 2008; he has a dozen or so solo and several dozen group exhibitions to his name - most of them at respected institutions. He has shown his works, among others, at the Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków, the Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art in Bytom, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the BWA in Katowice and Wrocław and the Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art in Słupsk, as well as the Art Agenda Nova gallery in Kraków. Combining conceptual coolness with a melancholy, literary imagination, Buczek is one of the most interesting and most self-ironic voices of his generation in Polish painting.