Postwar Szczecin, a city of uncertain status. A Prussian ruin being systematically stripped of building materials for the capital, while the new people’s authorities searched for justification of the newly established borders. Through artifacts, physical remnants and stories rooted in the past, Rybkowski weaves a narrative addressing ongoing, real-life issues surrounding migration and the formation of identity. In this exhibition, the artist showcases his latest premiere works alongside creations from recent years.
The exhibition invites reflection on loss, the rewriting of history, and modern experiences of space. It centers around themes of reconstruction and imagination. Clear boundaries between what is real and what is shaped by collective or individual memory begin to blur. One of the key motifs is the ruin as a structure bearing traces of transformation. Dance lines imprinted on a reconstructed parquet floor recall the recording of the body in space, while fragments of sky from historical battle scenes drift freely, as if detached from time. The artist creates places, images and objects that operate at the intersection of fact and speculation. They bear traces of something that once existed or could have existed. In his work, he employs painting, architectural details, sculptural forms, and video to create a mosaic of a specific intersection of cultures, interests, and layered heritage. A cultural patchwork in which one can independently read hidden layers and confabulatory threads.
Walter Benjamin, writing about the aura of a work of art, pointed to its inseparable connection with time and place – the specific “here and now.” Rybkowski’s works operate against this stability. Here, the aura appears as something recovered or imagined, and time as a fluid, distorted phenomenon. A major inspiration for Rybkowski is the urban space composed of layers, transformations, and discontinuities – in the spirit of Andreas Huyssen’s concept of the city as a palimpsest. Rybkowski does not reconstruct specific events or local histories. His approach is more intuitive and universal. Art becomes a tool for posing questions about the identity of space and its mutability. A place for reflecting on how culture is inscribed into matter and how easily it can disappear from it.
Filip Rybkowski (b. 1991) is a visual artist who employs a critical act of reconstruction combined with reflection on the political nature of acts of restoration, reproduction, and conservation in his artistic practice. His works cross the traditional boundaries of painting, entering the realm of mosaics, objet trouvé, and installation. Rybkowski combines the poetics of the fragment with iconographic context, juxtaposing original artifacts and reconstructions with image-quotes. His works have been shown, among others, at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Central Museum of Textiles, Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery in Kraków, KODE Art Museum in Bergen, and Krakauer House in Nuremberg. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. Co-founder of the Piana Gallery Foundation promoting young Polish artists. In 2024, he received the Grand Prize at the KAF Young Art Prize 2024 competition. He comes from Szczecin and lives and works in Kraków.