|
Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941)
Cracovienne fantastique,
Op. 14 no. 6
Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)
Three Mazurkas, Op. 41
E minor
B major
A-flat major
Grande Valse Brillante, Op. 34, no. 1
Grande Polonaise Brillant précédée
d’un Andante spianato , Op. 22
Marek Zebrowski, piano
Zygmunt Stojowski (1870-1946)
Concertstück
for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 31
Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)
Polonaise Brillante for Cello and Piano,
Op. 3
Lars Hoefs, cello
Marek Zebrowski, piano
Marek Zebrowski was born in Poznań, Poland, and began studying piano at the age of five. After graduating with the highest honors from the Poznań Music Lyceum, he went to France, where he was a pupil of Robert Casadesus and Nadia Boulanger. Mr. Zebrowski came to the United States in 1973 and continued his studies of piano with Russell Sherman at the New England Conservatory of Music, where he received his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees.
Hailed as “firm and eminently musical” by the Boston Globe, “strong and noble” by the Washington Post, and accorded highest accolades by the world press, Marek Zebrowski has appeared extensively as soloist in recital and with symphony orchestras throughout the world. He has recorded works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Scriabin and Prokofiev for the Polish Radio, appeared in Public Television broadcasts in the United States, and recorded works by Ravel and Prokofiev for Apollo Records in Germany. His performances and compositions are also featured on the Titanic Records and Harmonia Mundi labels. |
Mariusz Dąbrowski
graduated with distinctions in painting from the Academy of
Fine Art in Warsaw, Poland where he was a student of professor
Stanisław Wieczorek, professor Walter Karling, professor
Tadeusz Dominik and professor Zbigniew Gostomski. In 2005 he
received Ph.D from Leon Schiller, Film Academy, Lodz, Poland.
He is a Chair of Photography Institute, Graphics Department,
Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw and an author of numerous exhibition
and events, among others: Warsaw Biannual of Media Art, Warsaw
Art Photography Festival, Spokojna Media Art Gallery, Fine arts
Academy, Warsaw; 2005-2007 photo open air workshop, in Sousse,
North Africa; photo workshop in Kazimierz Dolny and over a dozen
of young art exhibitions in Poland and abroad. He is also an
Editor-in-Chief of "Media Art/ Sztuka Mediów" magazine.
Fragments from an essay: Mariusz Dąbrowski: Painting Beyond Painting by Grzegorz Dziamski:
"Hot Painting and Cold Photography
Mariusz Dąbrowski was completing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, at Department of Painting, when Kaspar Koenig organized “Der zerbrochene Spiegel” . He could be among the students about whom Koenig said that they perfectly knew that painting was obsolete medium in the world of electronic reproduction but even so they still painted. This contradiction is intriguing, because it is typical for painters from Mariusz’s generation – contradiction between theoretical knowledge and artistic practice. Painters who started in the 1990s developed their painterly practice against theory, or in other words, their painting arose from the conflict between theory of art and artistic practice.
After graduation from the Academy, Mariusz Dąbrowski was engaged in painting and photography, probably even more in photography than in painting, what is demonstrated by the list of his exhibitions in the 1990s. He used those two media separately, as though they belonged to two different artistic domains, unless he did not find his own, unique way to connect painting with photography. It came suddenly and unexpectedly. Let us compare two cycles of his “Still Life” - “Still Life” from 2001, shown at the 35th Painting Competition Bielska Jesień in Bielsko-Biała (2001) to triptych “Still Life x 3” from 2004, presented at 20th Festival of Polish Contemporary Painting in Szczecin (2004). Both awarded. The first cycle represents merely outlined objects of everyday use: bottles, cups, bowls, vases; soft contour relieves them objectiveness, gives them transparency, changes them into phantom of things placed against the decorative background. All pictures are painted in homogenous, faded tonality with gentle accents of stronger colors in blue or red contour of one or two objects. Triptych “Still Life x 3” represents realistically painted blue sofa, placed in undefined black space, and two other, identical sofas crossed by regular, vertical stripes of red paint. Object, though graspable and obvious serves here only as a pretext – painterly pretext to sharp, contrast-based juxtaposition of colors, play of light, brightens and flashes of painted planes (a blue sofa seems to emit the light of a television screen) and illusory play of depth and surface. Bożena Kowalska quoted an interesting artist’s comment to those paintings:
“I take pictures of found objects. In the computer I purify them and design a sketch of color and then I do something quite different using the traditional painting conventions.”
The starting point of the last cycle is photography; it gives concreteness to the objects presented on the canvases and roots them in the external, real world. But this link is slack because Dąbrowski, in opposition to Richter or Warhol, uses digital photography, which can be purified in computer and lose what is most important for photography – contingency. Everything that accidentally came into frame is removed and what remains is a pure, corrected by the artist form of object which can be further transformed by painting’s techniques. Dąbrowski does not cool off painting by photography; he makes something quite different - overheats photography by means of painting. He works differently than most painters from his generation who, following Richter, tend to cool off painting.
Dąbrowski paints not only sofas but also other everyday life objects – bottles, cups, bowls, lamps. The last objects can be easily identified in the painting tradition (Giorgio Morandi, Jerzy Nowosielski, Kiejstut Bereźnicki) yet the sofas defend themselves before such adaptation. They seem to go beyond painting, towards design, towards advertising message which prompts the question whether painting is a set of techniques which can be transferred
to another medium.
Videopainting
The recent project of Mariusz Dabrowski, called “Photo-pictures” (Galeria El, Elbląg 2007), is a continuation of his previous interests. The medium indeed has changed – painting gets replaced by video projection, still the artistic problem remains unchanged. The starting point are also in this case, everyday, usual, common objects, but this time they are not photographed but filmed, filmed by a camera with deregulated lenses. In effect we see blurred pictures, reduced to colorful spots – a moving painting picture. The link between those moving pictures and the real objects is preserved in the titles, in names: blue folder, open wardrobe, book, heater, television screen, painting, tulip, glass of red wine, leaf. All those objects are objects from the artist’s nearest environment, from his studio, but they lost their familiarity being transformed into painting hieroglyphs.
Dąbrowski’s paintings are not only moving, and more precisely flickering, the are also audial; abstract color spots are associated with sound, the television sound. Hot visual medium is supplemented by cool medium – television. But is television reduced to sound still cool medium? It seems so, because we are able to complete (in imagination) television images we do not see much easier than complete the abstract spots we have before our eyes. Introducing television, in double sense, because one of the picture is the picture of televisions screen, is significant. For McLuhan, television was especially responsible for changing hot print culture into cold culture – television “has turned the hot American culture into a cool one that is quite unacquainted with itself.” Jean Baudrillard, who in “L’echange symbolique et la mort” (1976) referred to McLuhan’s distinctions, could add that new media of reproduction introduced us into epoch of simulation where media rule the process of signification.
Mariusz Dąbrowski as an artist is not interested in media studies. He uses various media with full awareness that they belong to various cultural orders, but his aim is not recognize and discover the specificity of particular medium. On the contrary, he connects and allows to diffuse different media to create media hybrids – videopainting of photo-pictures putting the question whether it is possible that painting can exist beyond painting? Dąbrowski shows that it is possible, that convention of the painting can go beyond painting and be implemented into another medium.
Media are the extension of man, they create the new environment to which man must adjust himself and change his way of seeing, his way of looking at the world and also at the painting."
|
