Opening: Saturday, 24.02.2023, 7 pm
The exhibition will open untill 27.04.2024
Tuesday–Saturday, 12 noon–7 pm
Profile Foundation
Franciszkańska 6
Warsaw
Mirosław Filonik, as he himself says, sticks to his geometry habits. He constructs spatial forms based on straight lines and basic geometric figures. He multiplies their rhythmic arrangements, creating more or less complex structures. The material of his installations since the late 1980s is light, which is carried by fluorescent lamps with their necessary instrumentation. He uses proprietary fluorescent lamps produced for him by Philips Lighting Poland. Previously, he used light similar to natural light, in recent years the spatial relations in his works have been developed in the rhythm of colours, as in the monumental installations shown five years ago in Opole under the slogan Three Colours.
The currently presented large round form fits into the space and architecture of the gallery’s interior, filling it with the immaterial effect of light. Built in the artist’s characteristic way, based on the repeatability of one module of a metal structure that spreads out in space with a geometric pattern of light. Despite formal reserve, his installation provokes movement and draws the viewer in with changing ways of seeing depending on perspective and location in space. Unpredictable systems of light, space and colours highlight “what the eye is not fully aware of.”
Filonik’s non-narrative art, based on abstract rhythms, has references to the trance-like, meditative practices of Far Eastern cultures. The artist also finds classic patterns of rhythms and divisions in Wacław Szpakowski’s systems of rhythmic lines. Rhythm determines his way of moving and interpreting space. The geometric discipline of spatial compositions combined with pulsating light acquires sensual qualities and opens up to the immaterial dimension of beyond reception experiences.
As part of the exhibition, in a separate room presented is a showcase with a miniature reconstruction of the installation titled Fish from 1989, one of the first works in which the artist used the action of light
Mirosław Filonik (1958) studied at the Faculty ofSculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the years 1980-1985. In thesecond half of the 1980s, together with Mirosław Bałka and Marek Kijewski, hecreated the Neue Bieriemiennost group. In the late 1980s he started workingwith light. Over the following decades, he completed several dozeninstallations eperating with light, the rhythm of signs and simple geometricforms. He is the author of a number of monumental installations shown indoorsand mounted in open spaces, on facades, towers and windows of contemporary andhistoric buildings. The exhibition is accompanied by a display of photographicand film documentation giving insight into his artistic practice since the late1980s, among others a number of spectacular installations from the Daylight System series.
