Whatiftheworld / gallery

28 July - 26 Aug 2007

OPENING: SATURDAY 28 JULY 2007 11H00 - 16H00

Whatiftheworld / Gallery 208 Albert Rd. Woodstock

The much anticipated debut solo exhibition by talented young painter Andrzej Nowicki sold out entirely on opening night. Andrzej Nowicki makes paintings and drawings that create parallel universes where people and objects multiply and metamorphose into ever more strange visions. His disquieting dreamlike tableaux combine the seductive allure of a fairy tales with the perverse playfulness of Surrealism and the insight of speculative fiction to create disordered narratives that hold several tensions in balance: between old and new, centre and periphery, East and West, sense and non-sense, logic and absurdity, beauty and grotesquery.

Born (1981) in Kielce in Poland, before moving to South Africa in 1989, his work frequently deals with transit and transience, often containing undercurrents that highlight the double side of globalisation – the glamour, speed and consumption of travel and technology but also the detritus and architectural scarring that it leaves behind. While he frequently depicts scenes from his hometown of Kielce, the spaces he creates have a generic quality, and yet they look strangely familiar: non-places where one gets the eerie feeling that not only that a crime has been committed, but also that its secrets are so deeply buried they can only be imagined.