Jakub Julian Ziółkowski's ( born 1980 in Zamosc, Poland, lives and works in
Krakow and Zamosc) painting reflects an extremely individualistic,
almost escapist position. This is an all the more emphatic choice since
he came on the scene as a kind of counterpoint to a generation of
Polish realist painters closely bound up with life, often painting from
photographs. Ziółkowski completed the same Krakow Academy of Fine
Arts only a few years after Wilhelm Sasnal, Marcin Maciejowski, and
Rafał Bujnowski, but he often stresses that he lived virtually cut off
from current events. Instead, his imagination found fodder in alternative
worlds. As Joanna Mytkowska explains, "we will never
find certain proof that it was a childhood spent in Zamosc that was the
decisive influence on the artist's imagination. But this microcosm of an
overgrown Renaissance city set in the middle of the lush Roztocze
plateau, its limits penetrated by wild vegetation, rhymes well with the
world represented in the paintings. The burden of living within the
confines of an ideal city, with the awareness of an extinct and
degenerated borderland culture and the Jewish ghetto, may also be of
significance. Alternative worlds, be it Sarmatians or computer games,
allow one to escape from reality—or to get a better view of it from afar."
