Tomasz Kowalski’s paintings and installations fascinate the viewer with their highly imaginative details, from which the artist creates strange scenes and scurrilous stories. Kowalski’s pictorial worlds make extensive use of the iconographic repertoire of art history, combining echoes of Brueghel and Bosch, still-life works by the Flemish masters, or naïve painting as recognisable citations to create new, apparently surreal landscapes and interiors.

Tomasz Kowalski is not searching for something completely new; his focus of interest is the changing way in which we see past trends and art movements. The muted, rather dark colours that Kowalski prefers to use, or the cobweb-like structures repeatedly found in his works, point to the deep and incomprehensible dimension of time, which is given precedence over space in his work as a painter.

In the latest works, Kowalski groups together key themes and motifs from past paintings to create a new form resembling installation, presenting organic parallel-worlds. “gniazdo” consists of a complex installation with wax figures dressed in dark clothing in a kind of stage set with strange props, which seems as if one of the artist’s dreams has taken shape in a theatre scene. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Kowalski’s ‘stage’ is reminiscent of Tadeusz Kantor’s absurd, unreal scenography.