Jakub Julian Ziolkowski: Timothy Galoty & The Dead Brains

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s phantasmagorical paintings roil with colorful mutant life: plants sprout eyeballs, bodies go about their business while sloughing off limbs and disgorging organs, and dense vegetal landscapes transform into visceral surgical tableaux. Vibrant and perverse, anthropomorphi... Read more

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s phantasmagorical paintings roil with colorful mutant life: plants sprout eyeballs, bodies go about their business while sloughing off limbs and disgorging organs, and dense vegetal landscapes transform into visceral surgical tableaux. Vibrant and perverse, anthropomorphic and surreal, Ziolkowski’s private language is the symbolic expression of a highly concerted imagination that also was shaped by life in a very small town: Zamosc, where the artist was born in 1980, is a remote Renaissance city that began as a fortress in the middle of the lush Roztocze plateau in southeast Poland. Here wild nature penetrates the edges of an idealized urban microcosm that was once a center of intellectual life and seat of Eastern Europe’s Chasidic Jewish community, later stained by Nazi atrocities, and today is home to a concentration of food factories. Influenced by Zamosc’s dream-like intersection of preserved history and encroaching modernity, Ziolkowski has nurtured an inner world where poetry and ornament, religiosity and eschatology, flourishing life and decay intertwine. This is the universe of Ziolkowski’s art.