Michał Chudzicki

Michał Chudzicki (b. 1983 in Kraśnik) is a painter and collagist, also creating installations, films and photographs. After the Secondary School of Fine Arts in Zamość he studied in 2006-2011 at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, where he defended his diploma in the studio of Professor Leszek Misiak. Since 2013 he has lived and worked in Lublin. He is a co-founder of the Roboczogodzina collective.

In his work the inspirations of the art of the Renaissance masters and of the 20th-century avant-garde (Dadaism and Surrealism) are clearly visible. He readily reworks famous motifs of European painting, but his most important tool is mystification: fiction used in order to question the official history of art and to test whether, as viewers, we need the works themselves or rather creators with their famous names.

This is most fully embodied by a long-running project begun in 2011, in which Chudzicki created the figure of Bruno Larek (1901-1936), a Polish painter, draughtsman and poet who died tragically in a fire, and began to make his „non-existent” works. He developed the mystification in successive instalments, including as the „Catalogue of Non-existent Works” at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw (2013) and cycles shown at the Biała Gallery in Lublin and the Polish Institute in Düsseldorf.

He showed his first solo exhibition, „Window”, in 2010 at Art Agenda Nova in Kraków. Further ones took place regularly, including „A Tale of These and Those” at the Bunkier Sztuki (2013) and „64 Short Stories” at the Biała Gallery (2019). He took part in many group exhibitions, at the Zachęta („Life. A User's Manual”, 2017), the Foksal Gallery Foundation („KREW-WERK”, 2016), the State Art Gallery in Sopot and MOCAK in Kraków, and his works are held, among others, in the collection of PKO Bank Polski. Combining painterly craft with an intellectual game, Chudzicki is one of the most interesting „mystifiers” of his generation, aptly diagnosing the mechanisms of the art world.