Mikołaj Sobczak

Sobczak’s practice combines painting, video and performance art. In his performative work he employs avant-garde concepts of postwar Polish theatre (such as Tadeusz Kantor and Witold Wandurski) for his contemporary concerns about queerness in a time of political radicalisation.

His paintings are equally invested with theatricality, complex figuration staged in dense tableaux, often based on the compositions of 19th century paintings, juxtaposed with popular culture subjects. Sobczak’s central project is to create contemporary history paintings by populating his paintings with representations of outstanding protagonist of various minorities' representatives activism, queer and emancipatory countercultural milieus and resistance movements, in imaginative company with provocatively phantasmic characters and creatures representing Sobczak’s genuine vision of transgressive utopia. Simultaneously, these new visionary communities are mirrored in the distorted images of an underworld of regressive and ambiguous political narrative depicted in mannerist and infernal mise-en-scenes.