Untitled

Works from the Partytury miast series by Antoni Mikołajczyk, which the artist has been creating since 1981, are some of his most famous works, alongside Zapisy świetlne (since 1979). The series features images of the trajectory of light emitted by street lights and car headlights in the urban environments. Mikołajczyk recorded them by taking long exposure photographs while moving around the cities. As a result, he created photographic records of light traces, representations of spatio-temporal relations in the form of lines, streaks, sometimes single, sometimes overlapping each other and creating irregular structures.Antoni Mikołajczyk studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, where he was involved with numerous artistic groups. These included the Zero-61 group (1967-1969), whose members worked on the intersection of photography and other visual arts, aiming to go beyond the narrow borders of artistic photography. From 1970 he belonged to the Film Form Studio, established at the Łódź Film School, a pioneering group that dealt with conceptual artistic practice and analytical art. Its ofunders and their output have had an enormous impact on Polish art of the 1970s and subsequent decades. Mikołajczyk explored new multimedia artistic activities, combining film and visual arts, happening and performance. In 1982 he founded the underground Art Consultation Point – an independent place for collecting documentation of artistic events. He was co-editor of the Fabryka independent international publication.

Marlena Chybowska-Butler