Untitled

Works from the Partytury miast series by Antoni Mikołajczyk are a record of spatial lighting situations, which – in addition to installations and artistic actions that use light as a creative element – are part of a special field of exploration and experimentation with photography and the relationship between light, space and time. Partytury miast are images of the trajectory of light emitted by light points in the urban environment, such as street lamps and car headlights, records of the trace of light, representations of spatio-temporal relations in the form of lines, streaks, sometimes single, sometimes overlapping and forming irregular structures.Antoni Mikołajczyk studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Between 1967 and 1969, he collaborated with the Zero-61 group, whose members worked at 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 Workshop, a group established at the Łódź Film School, pioneers in conceptual art practices and analytical art. Its founders – Józef Robakowski, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Paweł Kwiek, Wojciech Bruszewski – had an enormous impact on the 20th century Polish art. In his work, Mikołajczyk transgressed traditional art genres and made use of various artistic techniques: from painting through photography and film to installation, action and light projections. In all these works light was the constitutive element of the work. Antoni Mikołajczyk was a professor at art universities in Toruń, Łódź and Poznań. He was twice awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar Program at Florida Atlantic City University in the United States (1999) and a Creative Scholarship from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage (2000).

Marlena Chybowska-Butler