Jakub Woynarowski
BIO
Jakub Woynarowski is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and independent curator tied to Krakow. He is a graduate and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. He makes projects in-between theory and visual practice. He rewrites art history, looking for the ideas of modernism and the avant-garde in earlier centuries. He is also a creator of essays, visual atlases, and graphic novels in the form of comics, for which he has received such awards as the Grand Prix at the International Comics Festival in Łódź in 2007 and the Grand Prix of the Polish Competition of Art Books and Albums in 2011. He created the concept for the Polish Pavilion at the 14th Biennale of Architecture in Venice in 2014. He won the Polityka Passport in 2014 in the visual arts category.
Artwork
Spectrum, drawing, 2020
The central element in Woynarowski’s drawing is a black cube. It levitates over a landscape filled to the horizon with architectural ruins. The minimalist form of the shape contrasts with the archaic style of the crumbling buildings, overgrown with plants, calling to mind the prints of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. It is unclear if this vision is a metaphorical image of a new beginning, or the definitive end of civilization. The direct inspiration for the drawing was Kasimir Malevich’s treatise “The Represented World,” in which he sketched a vision for a new world, devoid of imagined objects, a desert “permeated with the spirit of non-objective sensations.” The architectural metaphor takes on the form of a dark cuboid in Woynarowski’s drawing, not far from the idea of the “Space Cube”—an esoteric idea popularized by Paul Foster Case, whose origins might be sought in the proto-Cabalist text Sefer Jecira, describing the world’s creation. On the other hand, the cubic specter could be an allusion to the idea of the “New Jerusalem,” which, according to many biblical interpretations, was cubic in form.
