Zbigniew Rogalski was born in Dąbrowa Białostocka in 1974. He graduated from the Painting Faculty of the Poznań Academy of Fine Arts, under Professor Jerzy Kałucki (1999). Shortly after his graduation, he formed the Magisters duo alongside Hubert Czerepok (2000-2002).
Since its inception, Rogalski’s painting has been self-referential, focused on the art and practice of painting rather than on the goal of producing an illusory image. Indeed, from a meta perspective, the artist sees the canvas not as a self-sufficient, detached space, but as a surface which bears the traces of his process. This choice is inherently gestural, and explicitly places Rogalski in the wake of seminal figures such as Jackson Pollock, a figure that Rogalski has referenced both visually and nominally in his own corpus. In the light of this inward-looking methodology, self-portraiture also periodically manifests itself as a genre. The mirror, as the prism reflecting the image, is a staple motif throughout his body of work.
Perception is multidirectional. After-images, film stills and photographs are manipulated to distort reality and challenge its optical definition. Even art history is meta-critically re-envisaged, traditional genres of painting, such as portraiture or landscape, finding new avenues of existence.
The underlying quest is that of vision, of artistic beholding, of separating truth from illusion, and then of blending them together again. The series Closer (2006) and How She Sees the Moon (2007) are great illustrations of these interwoven concerns, where subject distance and filter reconfigure the depicted image. Eye Tracking (2011), a series based on painterly collage in which the artist took blurry photographs and traced a pattern in black paint upon them, approached vision from a more biological perspective.
For all these reasons, Rogalski’s art is best described as illusionistic and contemplative.
Recent solo exhibition by the artist include:
Landscapes from the Depths of the Painter’s Eye, Gdansk City Gallery 2, Gdansk (2015); View from the Depths of the Eye, Raster, Warsaw (with Slawomir Elsner) (2015); Scarification, Akinci, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2015); Eye Tracking, Akinci, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2013); The Paralax and the Gaze of Zbigniew Rogalski, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (2010); New Works about Death, Raster, Warsaw (2010); Painting and Photography, Polnisches Institut, Düsseldorf, Germany (2010); Echo, Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2009); Echo, Żak | Branicka, Berlin, Germany (2009); First Snow, Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok (2009); Shot, Jack Hanley Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (with Michał Budny) (2008).
Rogalski lives and works in Warsaw.
