Wschód is pleased to present Mikołaj Moskal’s second solo show with the gallery titled “Works on paper 2020-2021” featuring paper collages and painterly reliefs that incorporate forms and impressions found in nature, artist’s surroundings creating a unique one-year journal.

Moskal’s dynamic, very distinctive and intimate compositions awake the feeling of solstice and elusiveness, the meditative value of a journey, the experience of a landscape in micro and macro scale. His paintings incorporating gestural brushstrokes and spatters, cut paper forms, biomorphic blobs, geometric blocks, speak also seductively of connection, transition, materiality. These densely worked abstractions – wild and alive – of the natural world, painted frequently on unconventionally shaped paper float in the space almost like dream catchers – pleasant and at the same time penetrating and ultimately impenetrable. Navigating through the maze of colourful and immersive installation we instantly notice a craft-like authenticity of Moskal’s process-based practice, which is embedded in paper material qualities. Artist’s collages, painterly reliefs and paintings exert a powerful sensory impact that is intensified by their unconventional and almost chaotic presentation: tacked into the wall, displayed in overlapping clusters without titles or dates the works are experienced as a coherent whole – each one inseparable from the others. The gallery space is also filled with the glimpse of Moskal’s personal, intimate objects from his studio in Kraków – traces of his past journeys, found objects through which we can capture the kaleidoscope of his accumulated memories. Despite its blooming excess, the exhibition is rooted in subtle relation between the energetic compositions inspired by volatility of natural environment and sensorial, enigmatic timeless world that is both beautiful and unfamiliar. The general impression is one of physical energy expressed in loose sweeps of abstract washes of colour. Artist’s vibrant forms are backed by faded echoes, as if they capture experiences slipping from immediate memory – the images seem to live somewhere between the representation of artist’s surroundings and representation of his recollections of it. The intuitive process of creating such diverse worlds is embedded in Moskal’s mind: “The image is lived, experienced, and preserved right beneath my eyelid and liberated afterwards in my studio where I sculpt it using paper”.