TORUN.- CoCA in Toruń invites you to an exhibition of Lech Majewski, the outstanding Polish director and audio-visual artist who became famous thanks to, among others, the exceptional movie he Mill and the Cross – an extraordinary interpretation of Breughel’s mysterious painting The Procession to Calvary. Fragments of that work will be shown during the exhibition in CoCA Znaki Czasu. However, the main part of the exposition consists of an instalment of the Krew Poety (Blood of a Poet) film series, specially prepared for Toruń, during which the artist develops a visual story full of symbols, visions and hidden meanings in dozens of simultaneously displayed video projections.
Blood of a Poet is a series of 33 videos that create one multi-threaded story.
The series had its world premiere at the Conjuring the Moving Image exhibition, a very prestigious retrospective of Majewski’s works organized in 2006 by MoMA in New York. Twenty projections from Blood of a Poet have been combined with the monumental architecture of CoCA’s column hall in an interesting manner that emphasizes its hieratic nature and central plan. Particular projections create multi-level relations both between themselves and the sculpture placed in the exhibition space, thus playing a unique spectacle in front of the viewer’s eyes. Simultaneous presentation of various parts of the series allows for constant interpretation of the whole work in new and unrepeatable ways. Lech Majewski once more proves his mastery in stimulating human imagination by means of image.
The exhibition also houses projections of the Bruegel Suite. In 2011 Lech Majewski finished his three-year-long work on The Mill and the Cross, a movie based on the masterpiece by Pieter Brueghel. That movie, as the author says, can be compared to a digital arras woven from the perspective, atmospheric phenomena and human figures. Its realization required both patience and imagination, as well as new CG technologies and 3D effects. The movie, starring Charlotte Rampling, Michael York and Rutger Hauer as Breughel, opened the Sundance film festival. Based on that intricate film work, Majewski made a series of video-art pieces entitled Bruegel Suite, which were shown in February 2011 in the Louvre and in June were displayed in Chiesa San Lio as a part of the 54. Venice Biennale. CoCA Znaki Czasu has a fragment of that work of art in its collection. The exhibition presents these pieces as well as a broad selection of the artist’s other works.
Lech Majewski is an extraordinary artist – he shares his visions through paintings, films, installations, novels, theatrical plays and operas shown mainly in the USA, Italy, Poland and France. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, but ultimately graduated from PWSFTviT (The Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School) in Łódź. He is the author of such films as, among others, Prisoner of Rio, Ewangelia według Harry’ego (Gospel According to Harry), Basquiat, Wojaczek, Angelus or Ogród rozkoszy ziemskich (The Garden of Earthly Delights). Majewski’s films, shown at festivals in Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Rome, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Chicago, London, Mar del Plata, Barcelona, Miami, Jerusalem, Moscow and Montreal, have won numerous awards.
His works have been presented in galleries and museums all over the world: Paris Louvre, Venice Biennale, Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, Museo des Belles Artes in Buenos Aires, Kunstagenten Gallery in Berlin, Image Forum in Tokyo, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Deutsches Filminstitute Museum in Frankfurt am Main, SmART Project Space in Amsterdam, The National Gallery in Washington (D.C.), Gallerie Embiricos in Paris, Art Institute of Chicago, Yokohama Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Aichi Arts Center in Nagoji, Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, National Museum in Gdańsk, Schindler’s Factory in Kraków and many others.
