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Painter, photographer, installation and video artist. Born 1974 in Biłgoraj, Poland.
1994-1996 he studied in the Faculty of Painting, Graphic Arts and Sculpture, Poznań Academy of Fine Arts. He continued his education at Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, where in 1999 he graduated in the studio of Prof Leon Tarasewicz. He lives and works in Warsaw and New York.
Both Gilewicz's painting work and his photography series are based on the illusion principle, revealing the visual tricks and falsifications inherent in the visual arts. From the very beginning of his career, the two media - painting and photography - have been almost equally important for Gilewicz. Even his graduation project at Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts was accompanied by a photographic appendix. The artist wrote then,
"For some years now I have been trying to combine painting with photography by making paintings in which the two techniques supplement each other. The split second of taking a photographic picture of a fragment of nature is then translated into weeks and months of making a painting. The finite painting is described by photographic images documenting the consecutive stages of its making."
In spring 2001, in Saska Kępa, Warsaw, Gilewicz presented a painting-and-photography installation "City - Estate - Studio - Apartment", comprising two oil paintings and a mosaic composed of some 1,000 photographs documenting the artist's immediate surroundings. The whole formed a panorama as seen from the balcony of his apartment.
In his painting work, Gilewicz often uses a strategy of camouflage, which he combines with hyperrealistic technique. These are no longer paintings trying to faithfully and illusively imitate reality, because Gilewicz fits them into the surroundings, the extant context, blending them with reality so that they cannot be distinguished from it. Such as in his exhibition at Galeria Arsenał in Białystok, where he showed paintings-objects imitating doors (2002).
One of Gilewicz's first projects utilising a strategy of camouflage and mimicry was that in Lublin in 2000, where he set up a canvas stretcher in a public park and painted what the canvas obscured so that it blended perfectly with the surrounding vegetation. Then, for the next two weeks, he repainted the picture every day, adapting it to the changing weather conditions and natural processes.
Prior to the opening of his exhibition at Foksal Gallery in Warsaw in 2005, Gilewicz placed three white canvas stretchers in a small park adjoining the gallery and visible from its windows. He then painted the canvases so that, when viewed from the gallery, they blended perfectly with the surroundings. In the exhibition, the artist showed two photographs documenting the process - the stretchers in the park before and after being painted over, as well as the canvases themselves. It turned out that the paintings, which in the photographs appeared as squares of equal size, were in fact irregularly shaped and had different dimensions. Ewa Witkowska wrote on the occasion of that exhibition,
"Wojciech Gilewicz exposes the illusion of art. He shows that our perception of the world around us is relative and always subject to some perspective. He builds a perfect illusion that pulls the viewer inside, only to suddenly shatter that illusion a moment later."
During one of his residences in New York, Gilewicz painted three canvases imitating wall graffiti tags. During the making of the paintings, the original wall was cleaned. The artist decided then to perform the rather radical gesture of covering it with his own paintings, without letting anyone know about it.
That gesture returned in many of the artist's subsequent projects, where he would place in public space canvas stretchers covering the elements of reality represented in them - such as basement windows, flagstones, or wall fragments. These paintings often blended with the surroundings so perfectly they were virtually indistinguishable from the background. When Gilewicz did that in Paris on a special invitation from Foundation Deutsch de la Muerthe in 2004, the viewers were handed special maps to help them find the paintings.
A similar project for Galeria Entropia in Wrocław continued for nine months. Gilewicz placed his 'imitations' of reality in the public space of the city in the autumn of 2006, to move them to the gallery in June 2007 for an exhibition called The Aporia of Painting. The title was highly adequate because for many months the paintings had been exposed to the elements, but the main factor at play here was the human one. Some paintings had been trodden on or run over by bicycles, others covered with posters, still others - destroyed or even stolen. The process was documented on video and photographs. The artist himself so spoke about it,
"Paintings gradually infiltrates reality, impersonating it. But often the surroundings change the paintings to the extent that it exposes and unmasks painting, because when a picture had pretended to be a flagstone and a car rolled over it, it no longer imitates anything but has been reduced to a broken plank with a primed canvas painted over with oil pigments stretched on it."
Gilewicz presented a project based on similar premises in Sanok in 2007 ("Revitalizations"). This time his paintings did not replace or imitate existing features, but filled wall dents and cavities.
In Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine, in turn, the artist introduced his interventions to the space of a museum located in a church building. Among works of religious art, he placed his small, almost imperceptible paintings, imitating, for instance, the textures and colours of the religious sculptures.
In Shanghai in early 2008, Gilewicz made a film based on similar interventions in reality - sites across the Chinese metropolis where he had placed his paintings, such as billboards or garbage dumps ("Intrude").
Gilewicz has also gained recognition for his photographic series "Them", started in 2002 and continued ever since. At this point, the series counts over seventy pictures. Each is a photographic self-portrait, and a double one at that. Gilewicz uses double exposure to photograph himself twice in the same setting in a single film frame. In some of these portraits he looks like a pair of twins, in others he makes sure the two figures have a distinguishing feature, e.g. the haircut. He often poses as persons seemingly strange to him, such as a waiter and a restaurant patron, or a yoga teacher and his disciple, while at other times he speaks about closeness. Some of the pictures in the series present situations that are ordinary, common, everyday. Others surprise the viewer with their slightly uncanny atmosphere or sexual undertones, forcing him to think about the protagonists' ambivalent sexual identity.
Karol Sienkiewicz, December 2008 (www.culture.pl)
