Maciej Kurak’s exhibition at the Galeria AT in Poznán is his first solo show after receiving a Deutsche Bank Foundation Award for a young artist from Poland in November 2005. The presentation of this prestigious award took place in the Zacheta National gallery in Warsaw and brought together a group of the most recognized and promising Polish artists under thirty-five. Kurak’s work is about the architectural and social reality of Poland in the early 21st century. It is a crooked and inhibited reality, comic and absurd, but above all it is fluid and surprising. In a humorous and unpretentious way, Kurak touches upon several important subjects such as homelessness, displacement, alienation, social functions of design and consumption. Most of his works are constructed on a thin line between commercially driven dreams, common expectations and absurd but existing realities of our habitat. He prefers to not to work in a gallery but in the public space or in the context of architecture. His work is a carefully constructed, sophisticated and surprising provocation. He looks for his audience not among gallery-goers but among ordinary passersby. It also appears that he is fascinated by the kind of anarchic inventive force one can observe on the streets of provincial towns, not only in Poland but in most regions of central European countries. This adoptive ingenuity has here become a cultural medium for an artistic strategy producing works full of incredible momentum, impudence and bravado.
Many of his works are monumental in scale. For example, last year in Poznán the artist showed a 1:1 replica of the facade of the house where he lives. Coming through the door, one found oneself in front of another replica of a different building. Sometimes Kurak’s interventions are more discreet: for Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok, the artist used an existing children’s playground and installed little electric motors in the swings so that they moved on their own. All of his works are deeply site-specific: surprising provocations in the context of a given space and its social function. During the 2004 Lódz biennial, Kurak constructed the typical kind of ugly hut used by workers as a temporary shelter on a construction site. Inside the hut he installed a room with a brand-new floor panels and furniture exactly like those seen in interior decoration magazines. It looks as if this work has now been continued two years later at the Galeria AT. The installation there consists of two parts. Kurak has invented a completely different entrance to the gallery and completely transformed the usual exhibition space into a very special kind of hybrid dwelling. The first thing the spectator encounters outside the gallery building is a typical shelter of the type made by homeless people. This is the entrance to the exhibition, which opens up a small utopian world made entirely of cardboard. It is a perfect copy of things one can buy in IKEA. A bed, a carpet, table and chairs, a wardrobe, wallpaper, even a little plant and a wooden floor are made with the touch of a real craftsman. They are all perfect replicas of the real products. This is a world to look at, not to live in; it is a copy of reality that takes its place exactly like a Baudrillardian simulacrum. The material used to make the furniture is normally used to wrap it, so many of the things at the show look as though they haven’t yet been unpacked. This shows that the function of appearance is more important than the real function.
One of the fundamental features of Kurak’s work is his intelligent sense of humor, derived not so much from literary erudition as from intuition backed by a shrewd sense of observation and understanding the spirit of the time. That is why Kurak’s art is at the same time conceptual and ludic, provincial and universal; it is a game the artist plays with just space and its limits. But, surprisingly, this does not prevent the art from being an interesting social commentary.