Wojciech Gilewicz - New Paintings 2006-2025

Wojciech Gilewicz began his painting series "New Paintings" in 2006, while living in the United States. His initial inspiration came from the advertising posters found in New York subway stations. Serving daily as carriers of information and commercial messages, they simultaneously provoke a wide range of spontaneous responses from graffiti writers and sticker artists, who cover them with inscriptions, tags, stickers, carved words, and doodles. From time to time, subway workers paint over the worn posters with black oil paint; over this new layer, fresh posters are eventually pasted—many of which also fall victim to acts of vandalism. These successive interventions create an extraordinarily diverse, dynamic visual form full of painterly references, which the artist finds deeply compelling.

For many years, consistently maintaining the format of 116.9 × 152.5 cm, Gilewicz has realistically, layer by layer, recreated the changes occurring in selected poster niches he observed and meticulously documented. Work on a single painting from the series could last for more than a dozen years, and each one contains many layers, many images—of which we see only the most recent. Every painting is accompanied by photographic or video documentation.

Since the artist’s return from New York in 2019, the "New Paintings" series has been gradually evolving. While retaining its core principles, Gilewicz has continued the series in Poland, opening himself up to new observations and contexts. Although the stretcher format remains unchanged, the scale of the depicted motifs has become more flexible. In some compositions, Gilewicz enlarges children’s drawings to monumental proportions; in others, he incorporates the Warsaw city logo, images from Baroque ceramics in the collection of the National Museum in Gdańsk, or graphics from an old school notebook found in the trash. All the works are united by keen observation of the surrounding environment and a desire to capture the dynamics of change in public space, along with its varied visual codes and the ways inhabitants interact with the urban landscape. The artist still works on each painting layer by layer. The long, slow process underpinning the creation of every piece remains one of the key aspects of the series.

The exhibition will present, for the first time in one place, all the works created as part of the "New Paintings" series. The idea of gradual change, multi-layered structure, and patient focus on the process will be reflected in an installation conceived from the outset as variable and process-based. The artist will be present not only during the opening; throughout the exhibition he will periodically rehang the works together with visitors, emphasizing the living, organic, and ever-evolving nature of the project.