Andrzej Bednarczyk — The Minotaur's Fables
Galeria Starmach / ul. Węgierska 5 / Kraków
The Minotaur's Fables / Andrzej Bednarczyk / 09.11.2023- 09.01.2024
opening 09.11.2023 / godz.18.00
exhibition finissage 09.01.2024 / godz. 18.00
curator: Robert Domżalski
The exhibition is part of the Open Eyes Art Festival 2023, organized by the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Nowa Huta Cultural Center, GAP Artistic Agency and the GAP Foundation.
Andrzej Bednarczyk, a transmedia artist and educator, hides his alter ego in the form of the minotaur. The labyrinth motif, present in the artist's work for years, takes the form of an environment in the Starmach Gallery, consisting of 12 corners-desktops and 72 reliquaries-boxes. A lonely half-man, half-bull, wanting to share his beliefs and thoughts on wandering through the maze, begins to tell tales as intricate as the corridors in which he lives.
The Minotaur's Fables are "written" in multiple sentences — the works contain numerous references to cultural texts, daily rituals, memories and dreams. A simple object, such as a cup, ladder or typewriter, becomes a pretext for a multi-threaded story. How else could a fable be told by someone whose greatest phobia is seeing a corridor with no other corridors leading away from it?
The seemingly impossible task is to wade through the thicket of quotations and the multitude of information. By breaking through this web of meanings, we are able to reach heavily veiled references to family history, as well as our own biography, strongly marked by Baptist religiosity. Just when it seems that we have found Ariadne's thread and are using it to head towards the exit, it turns out that we are holding a medical tube or an electrode which, as in an electroencephalographic test, leads to our own head.
IX
A few years ago, Minotaur had a serious accident that confined him to bed for many months. To this day, his ribs are not fully recovered. The main characters of the fable about the loss of mobility are bandaged crutches with eagle feathers that cross over a prosthesis with a built-in clock mechanism. Everything passes. We can lose our health at one moment. Two saws cutting into the work make us feel the pain. Minotaur, however, does not seek sympathy. The message of the fable is a testimony of will to live and continuous self-development. The greatest expression of this power are the drawings made on a digital tablet, present in every fable. During his recovery, the artist learned this artistic technique and became proficient in it.
The installation surprises its precise execution — one gets the impression that it was created by a 19th-century craftsman. Combined with a well-thought-out arrangement, The Minotaur's Fables provide a unique artistic experience.
Minotaur remains hidden in his maze. The only way to reach him is to listen carefully to his twelve fables.
The best dictionary of Andrzej Bednarczyk's visual language was written by Dorota Folga-Januszewska and published by ABC Gallery in the "Andrzej Bednarczyk. Mistrzowie polskiego malarstwa współczesnego", printed in Poznań in 2005. Symbols such as stone, labyrinth, number or legend are still used in the artist's work and appear in new contexts. Each fable is overwhelming with its multitude of content. This essay is an attempt to choose just one of many paths in the Minotaur-Bednarczyk labyrinth.
Robert Domżalski
fragments of the curatorial text in the catalogue "Andrzej Bednarczyk. Bajki Minotaura”, wyd. Starmach Gallery, ISBN: 978-83-942324-6-7, Kraków 2024
foto: Love IDAA