Galeria Piekary invites you to an exhibition by Krzysztof Mętel (b. 1993), a graduate of Painting at the University of the Arts in Poznań, and, as of 2024, also a PhD holder and lecturer at that same institution. He was a resident at the Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdańsk, participated in a student exchange with Shanghai Normal University, and co-founded the artist-run space Pani Domu in Poznań. He is the author of the book Każdy kończy, kiedy mu się podoba(“Everyone Finishes When They Want To”), in which, among other things, he conducted interviews with young creators.
Krzysztof Mętel is interested in the creative process, the painterly gesture, and the relationship between the image and discourses beyond painting. He employs montage and appropriation, often working with found objects—items of uncertain status, such as a sun-bleached military tarpaulin or the illustrations in a withdrawn Polish biometric passport, which serve as barely perceptible backdrops for customs stamps.
Currently, the artist uses paintings that were unsuccessful or discarded. This is another stage in his work with found objects, this time processed by other painters. Mętel complicates the status of this collection by including his own older or failed works. Through interventions in their shape, size, or composition, and by adding further layers of paint, he reaches a point at which these initially shaky, failed constructions begin to stabilize and regain their desired status. At the same time, he always leaves traces of their original forms visible.
The main points of reference for these activities are elements of the artist’s biography: competitive sports in which he once participated and the fate of his hometown. The process of grappling with artworks marked by failure is likened by the artist to a relay race, another attempt after an unsuccessful start in track and field, or winning a match in extra time. The works address themes shared by sport and art: spectacle, success and defeat, discipline, competition, and judgment. Meanwhile, his hometown of Nysa—serving various functions throughout its history, repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt, a true collage of a city—became a natural model for broadly understood practices of montage, for establishing meaning through the juxtaposition of differences, and above all for attentive observation of anything that someone else has devoted their time and care to.
Mętel presented his first solo exhibition, Anestetyki, in a rented doctor’s office at the NZOZ Plac Kolegiacki clinic in Poznań. Since then, he has held over a dozen solo shows in Warsaw, Opole, Gdańsk, and Poznań—where he also defended his doctoral thesis, Montaż, at Rodriguez Gallery. He has taken part in group exhibitions in Poland and the Czech Republic as well.