2024
oil on canvas
150 x 150 cm
Starting bid: 5 000 zł
Kamil Kukla works in painting, drawing, digital graphics, and experimental music. He began working on the painting Gripby drawing on the familiar language of allusive abstraction. A quasi-landscape emerged on the canvas relatively quickly—constructed through layered and tangled forms that merely evoke recognisable elements of reality, ones the brain instinctively registers. Yet in this matter, a rupture occurs: a fissure through which something sharply tangible breaks through—his left hand, gripping an imaginary object.
As the artist states, this image is a lingering impression from a tram ride back from my studio, when I caught myself observing my own hand clinging to a metal pole inside the moving vehicle. In that moment, my body appeared alien, as if seen from the perspective of a passenger trapped within it—someone who, on the one hand, can control it like a vehicle steered by personal will, and on the other, experiences it as a foreign entity, distant and unreachable, like a hill outlined on the horizon.
Grip is therefore a fusion of a purely painterly world and a specific autobiographical moment. It combines an introspective, painterly exploration with mundane reality, viewed from a POV angle. In that sense, it belongs to a series of self-portraits—not of the face, but of what the eyes embedded in that face see, as in a first-person perspective video game.
Kamil Kukla (b. 1989) is a painter and creator of digital graphics, objects, and experimental music. In 2013, he graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. Since 2014, he has been teaching at the Faculty of Art at the Tarnów Academy.
In 2017, he participated in artist residencies at MeetFactory (Prague) and Dukley Art Center (Kotor, Montenegro). He is the recipient of the Grey House Foundation Award (2016) and a finalist of the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation Award (2018). His works are part of museum and gallery collections, including MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, the National Museum in Gdańsk, and the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in Kraków.
