What can we get at the newsagent’s? The exhibition Kolporter [Newsvendor] presents systems of information transmission that are at once archaic and timeless.
Piotrek Kowalski’s kinetic installation, resembling a slide or a lottery machine, delivers a binary verdict every four minutes. Its form evokes both the promise of success and the structures that predetermine failure.
The artist’s works evoke Constructivist art: Kowalski reinterprets its characteristic relationship with applied art and its preoccupation with movement and technology, transforming faith in modernity into nostalgia or irony. Functional materials such as metal, concrete and plastic are enlisted in support of the visionary inventions of a society emerging from political transformation. Rather than striving towards abstraction, these geometric objects form a backdrop to everyday life, evoking a newsagent’s, a post office or a playground. In Kolporter, this reality proves both unbearable and artificial, much like the taste of Aroma King.
text for Kolporter exhibition by Weronika Wojda
There is something of a landscape-like approach in Kowalski’s subversive work - he creates abstracted islands, fragments of reality. His works (...) are characterized by a distinctive lightness and gentleness, despite their heavy philosophical content. His spatial compositions are often based on rhythm or an ordered structure, which are subject to disruptions - both formal and in terms of content.
fragment from Zeszyty exhibition text, 2026
A traditional view on sculpture suggests a monumental dispositif of a skilled hand, which Piotrek challenges through a distinctive application of familiar shapes: droplets, bowling pins, footprints, keyholes. At Autokomanda, the installation plays with the associations evoked by these shapes, creating a dioramic experience in which the viewer is invited to jump between scales and perspectives. This setting of almost-belonging to the scene strongly holds a ghostly presence of time: a paper surrounded by trees from which it is made spins on the shutter blind, accompanied by a pair of keys and a functional digital watch that runs one hour ahead.
fragment from the Early Works exhibition text
Take an apple or tomato on the road, let it grow by an order of magnitude. The meridians and parallels are swelling. The trajectory of a fruit fly's movement could be tracked by flightradar, if there was a point to it. Let's take a clock and move its flat dial into the third dimension. Time is now running down hard like asphalt melted by the sun. One day is one ping-pong ball, a year could be enclosed in a packet. Now take any slice of the city and remove everything that distinguishes it from any other arbitrary slice of the city. It's even possible to do this with some landmark, such as Gdansk Station.
All that will be left are the coffers, the leaflet stands, the change trays, the waste from the decommissioning of some kiosk spilling out of the gruzbag. Let's call it a small infrastructure altogether. This is the kind of raw material Piotrek Kowalski works with. Sometimes he tinkers with scale, sometimes he subtracts or adds one dimension to objects or phenomena. Basically, however, he stays with the concrete, the rack upholding the suggestion of the original function.
The primary function of this small infrastructure is to organize reality. Or more specifically: to organize space in such a way as to allow the circulation of products and air, information and transactions. The task the artist-logist sets himself is to catch these flows with a sculptural grasp that gives them material form. He catches where it rasps, pulls the glitch into a database along with dust and lost coins, and sees what he gets out of it.
text by Maja Demska
In front of the shop there is an extensive car park. Along its edge, a metal pole and a concrete sphere are installed alternately. Together, these structures organise the space, yet maintain a distance from each other. Starting from these figures, I decide to build a symbolic family of products and stage their display.
(quote from Panorama 8's exhibition text)
