Exhibition: Hideout in the Corner of Level 6

Bureau is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Polish artist Wojciech Bąkowski, his first with the gallery. Bąkowski works in diverse media unleashing his idiosyncratic and poetic voice through drawing, sculpture, audio and animated video. Layers of atmospheric noise and music mingle with barren representations of urban space. The artist’s synesthetic vistas are built from a gorgeous chaos of sound and color blurring sense data in a pulsing infusion of aural and visual stimuli.

Opening the exhibition is the eponymous audio piece, Hideout in the Corner of Level 6. The looping and sparsely layered sound conjures unseen action unfolding as it were from the artist’s hiding place inside a synthetic world. Within this confined enclosure, amidst the sounds of toads, ticking clocks and crackling fire, the artist projects his dramatic vision. Through sound, the mental image of this unfolding drama is transmitted into our minds. The artist’s own conflation of the senses is contagious. Passing into the main gallery, his floor sculpture, Money, Keys, Housing and Abstractions presents itself as a twittering machine of a darkened city: a machinist apparition buzzing with memory and loss.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Bakowski’s new animated film, Analysis of Emotions and Vexations (II). In it, Bąkowski’s imagistic poetry describes the arcane mechanisms of the mind through pulsating drawings and haunting sound. The landscape of thought that unfolds defies strict delineations between inside and outside. Memories turn inside the head like projections from the exterior world, while the movement of watery vistas or passing car lights on city streets appear to be provoked by the power of reverie. There is a churning energy to Bakowski’s work, beating in the kinetic elements of his sculpture, in the distant chimes and bluster of his sound, and the weak flickers of lights that blink and extinguish, leaving darkness and the isolation of thought. The poetry driving all of these works is propelled by the echoing of Bakowski’s distinctive, stoic voice which speaks with emotion and vehemence.

Image above: Analysis of Emotions and Vexations 2, 2016, HD animated film (still) Wojciech Bąkowski (b. 1979 Poznan, PL, lives and works in Warsaw, PL) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Poznan. Recent solo exhibitions include: Main Issues, Vosberg, Cologne, DE, Weak Moods’ Control; Galeria Stereo, Warsaw; There’s a Pain Somewhere In The Room, Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, PL; and Realizing, Audio Visual Arts, New York. He has been included in group exhibitions A Million Lines, Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow, PL; Prototypes, XII Baltic Triennial, Vilnius, LT; It Rained Again, Bureau, New York; Voice, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; The Day is Not Enough, Warsaw Contemporary Museum; The Generational: Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York. His works have been screened at numerous international film festivals and, in 2014, Sound of My Soul won the main prize at the film festival in Oberhausen. In 2009 he was awarded the Deutsche Bank Prize. His works are in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Museum Sztuki, Lodz and CCA Ujazdowksi Castle, Warsaw.