2024
aluminium, acrylic
50 x 20 x 20 cm
Starting bid: 5 000 zł
Paweł Czekański’s practice balances irony and subversion, exploring the absurdities of contemporary life through new visual narratives. Healing Hands continues the artist’s ongoing series of works that reference motifs of food, fruit, and vegetables. His work paraphrases the famous phrase “You are what you eat,” coined by the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. A proponent of gastrosophy—the philosophy of nourishment and fine food—Feuerbach argued that our actions, thoughts, and very being are inextricably linked to what we consume.
Operating within a posthumanist framework, Czekański’s sculptures engage with a global sense of existential melancholy, cleverly subverting the traditional subject-object hierarchy and offering a vision of the future that seeks to transcend human limitations and expand the very notion of what it means to be human.
Irony and grotesque, the banality of the depicted scene, reflect the wider banalisation of social and moral discourse in today’s public sphere. The work poses a provocative question: in an age of hyper-consumption—not only of food but of meaning, relationships, and identity—has the human being itself become an object of consumption?
Paweł Czekański (b. 1989) creates installations, sculptures, films, and photographs.
He holds a doctorate in fine arts and graduated from the Faculty of Painting and Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, where he has been a lecturer since 2018 in the Faculty of Sculpture and Art Mediation.
His works have been exhibited in venues such as BWA Wrocław Główny, the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont (USA), and Rathaus Johannisthal Gallery in Berlin. In 2022, he was nominated for the Warto Award in the Visual Arts category.
