Olaf Brzeski

Olaf Brzeski (b. 1975 in Wrocław) is a sculptor, draughtsman and author of installations and experimental films - one of the most important representatives of contemporary Polish sculpture. After a year of study at the Faculty of Architecture of the Wrocław University of Technology (1994-1995) he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, defending in 2000 his diploma in sculpture in the studio of Professor Leon Podsiadły. He made his debut in 2001, winning the competition for the monument to the Orange Alternative in Wrocław, where he lives and works to this day.

His sculptures, objects, environments, films and drawings grow out of the dark regions of the imagination and from the individual and collective past, building ambiguous, unsettling narratives. Brzeski creatively reinterprets the tradition of sculpture - he reaches for classical forms, such as the bust or the human figure - placing the emphasis not on their physical but on their emotional dimension. He does not shy away from an aesthetic of ugliness and a free play with scale; the source of these fantastical forms is thought, and then drawing - the simplest metaphor for the act of creation.

Equally important to him is the tension between matter and its potentiality - between what the work describes and the very possibility of description. His most famous work, „Dream - Spontaneous Combustion” (2008), is a sculpted cloud of black smoke suspended in the air; it arose under the influence of a physicist's lecture that ended with the statement that fire is nothing other than matter changing form. In other realisations - destroyed, smashed and reconstructed - he made destruction a method, showing an art that exists by decaying.

Working in series and recurring motifs, Brzeski has built one of the most recognisable languages in Polish sculpture of the recent decades. He has shown his works at numerous solo exhibitions - among others at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the BWA galleries in Wrocław and Zielona Góra, the Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdańsk, the Czarna Gallery and OP ENHEIM in Wrocław - and in important international surveys: at the International Triennale of Contemporary Art in Prague (2008), East International in Norwich (2009) and „Power of Fantasy” at BOZAR in Brussels (2010). His works are held, among others, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the National Museum in Wrocław.