Works; Michal Budny

The Works exhibition is the first review of Michal Budny's (b. 1976) painting. His work is one of the most accessible (though technically most unorthodox) phenomena of Polish 21st century sculpture. It is characterized by extensive skill and frankness, respect for the medium, reality and its phenomena, as well as imagination and poetic metaphor. Using simple everyday materials - paper, cardboard, adhesive tape - the artist builds things so refined, complex and unusual: cardboard cell phones, portable CD players, lumps of coal, unfinished letters, or libraries lacking a single line of text. Budny's elegance and awareness of form garners attention. He formulates an original sculpture paradigm, his own aesthetic, and builds a world in which concepts of subtlety and expressiveness coexist in harmony. Budny is an artist bold enough to take on a category of beauty without any cynicism. He finds forms for formless phenomena like rain, light, silence and emptiness. All the while, he remains substantive and concrete, even when visualizing the most abstract concepts. His works are not so much shows as models and mock-ups of objects, phenomena and concepts. The artist creates 1:1 scale models; he is interested in replication not representation. Maps and mirrors are some of the themes Budny explores. Budny's narration, rich and metaphor, is born at the intersection of several themes: geometry and minimalism, modeling, formal analysis and poetic synthesis, refined aesthetics and handcraft. Packaging materials are some of his favorite media. Budny's work may be modestly referred to as packaging: he creates packaging for the material and immaterial phenomena of reality - he packages existential experience in his art.