Blood, Concrete, Sun | Maciej Nowacki i Miłosz Tomkowicz

The exhibition Blood, Concrete, Sun brings together paintings by Maciej Nowacki and sculptures by Miłosz Tomkowicz. Both artists engage in a dialogue with the monumental aesthetics of authoritarian systems, reinterpreting its role in shaping identity and collective consciousness. Here, the human body becomes a vessel for collective dreams, fears, and projections of the future. Working on the “ruins” of grand narratives and visual languages associated with power, the artists subject them to contemporary transformations—Nowacki filters them through a queer sensibility, while Tomkowicz does so through the grotesque and myth. History and visual patterns do not appear here as closed chapters of the past, but as living reservoirs of meaning, constantly generating new interpretive perspectives. The exhibition reveals the desires of myth-making narratives that continue to shape the collective imagination, yet remain entangled in the ambivalence of a longing for community, limited by the potential threat of top-down violence.
In his latest series of works, Maciej Nowacki juxtaposes queer bodies with the socialist realist imagination, treating architecture, monuments, and statues of “builders” as an ambivalent legacy open to new interpretations and meanings. The artist places queer individuals in spaces marked by a history of oppression and collectivism, while simultaneously bringing out their utopian potential for care, solidarity, and work toward the future. Intimate, everyday gestures—resting, painting nails, or braiding hair—become a counterpoint to patriarchal ideals of strength and heroism. Here, the fragility of the body is not a sign of weakness, but a tool for challenging contemporary narratives based on domination, hierarchy, and rigid binary oppositions. The series of paintings sketches a vision of a non-heteronormative future based on solidarity, reciprocity, and cooperation as an alternative to social models rooted in individualism and competition.
For Miłosz Tomkowicz, the starting point is a fascination with humanity, genealogy, and the archaeology of images—both those rooted in antiquity and myth, and those derived from the iconography of power. The artist juxtaposes utopian monumentalism with an archaic, and at times grotesque, imagery, presenting the body as a space for negotiating identity and domination, as well as a vehicle for collective fantasies of strength and heroism. In his works, militarism, folklorism, and the aesthetics of pathos characteristic of authoritarian systems take on a quasi-grotesque dimension, revealing the need for myth, ritual, and community that constantly resurfaces beneath the surface of modern narratives. Drawing on visual traditions and artifacts of the past, Tomkowicz uses the aesthetics of authoritarian systems as a starting point for creating new arrangements of forms and symbols. Here, they are revealed anew in the context of contemporary fears related to war, violence,
and aspirations to transcend human limitations.