Piotr uklanski biography of martin
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West Meets East: Piotr Uklański Interviewed
Theory + Practice
Repainting a europeisk encounter with the Ottoman Empire.
November 4, 2019
Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Eastern Promises V), 2018, ink and acrylic on mohair velvet over canvas, 65.25 × 51.25 inches. artighet of the artist and Luxembourg & Dayan, New York.
Over his two-decade career, Polish artist Piotr Uklański has adopted and subverted various genres, producing works about collective memory, appropriation, truth, and fiction. In his installation, photography, painting, and film, Uklański pushes duration and scope, like his feature-length Polish Western, Summer Love (2006), set in post-Communist Eastern Europe and played bygd Polish actors—and Val Kilmer—or his photographs of 164 different actors playing Hitler in various films in Uklański’s infamous photo installation, The Nazis (1998).
A jokester and somewhat of a provocateur, Uklański consistently questions historical assumptions, cu
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Solo exhibitions
Year
Country
Exhibition Name
Location
Year
Country, Exhibition Name, Location
2022
F
Piotr Uklański
MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris
F
Il Tormento di Chopin
Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris, Paris
2022
F, Piotr Uklański, MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris
F, Il Tormento di Chopin, Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris, Paris
2020
USA
Suicide Stunners’ Séance
Belmont Chapel - Island Cemetery, Newport
I
How they met themselves
Massimo De Carlo, Milano
2020
USA, Suicide Stunners’ Séance, Belmont Chapel - Island Cemetery, Newport
I, How they met themselves, Massimo De Carlo, Milano
2019
USA
Ottomania
Luxembourg + Co., New York
2019
USA, Ottomania, Luxembourg + Co., New York
2015
USA
Piotr Uklański: Collages
Nahmad Contemporary, New York
USA
Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklanski Photographs
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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Piotr Uklański
An ongoing theme in Piotr Uklański’s practice is the role of photography in establishing commonality, in making and challenging group identity. Uklański’s series Eastern Promises draws on historical links between Poland and the Islamic world. In the nineteenth century, projections of the ‘Orient’ contributed to a nationalising sentiment within Poland, where Muslim Tatar settlers have existed since the fourteenth century. Uklański’s series explores masculinity, the sitting portrait and iconography, while explicitly targeting the Islamophobia spreading today in the West and contemporary Poland’s suppression of its own history.
Piotr Uklański (b. 1968, Warsaw, Poland) has constructed a diverse body of work that exploits as many types of media (sculpture, photography, collage, performance, and film) as it promiscuously absorbs cultural references. Uklański’s work often draws polemical reactions since the artist does not shy away from potentially controversial subje