Krzysztof Jung
Krzysztof Jung was a dazzling personality as well as a pioneer in the realm of Polish performance art and LGBTQIA+ issues. He studied interior design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1971 to 1976 and graduated with a performance piece, though most of his later artistic output was devoted to drawing and painting. He has been rediscovered posthumously as a creator of male nude drawings, these being portraits of men with whom he was intimately acquainted. During his lifetime, however, he was known as a portraitist of “trees.” During the mid-1970s, Jung pursued work on his “Plastic Theatre”—a
unique art form combining performance and environment where rope was used to create web-like arrangements that enabled the artist to reconfigure a given space. In these “threadings,” ropes connected the participants—among them the artist. Jung realized one such action, “Metamorphosis,” in 1978 with a very small audience: it involved a naked male model seated at the center of the space whom the artist tied to the likewise-seated observers, thanks to which every movement of the performer had an effect on the others. Jung eventually found a community of like-minded artists at Emil and Elżbieta Cieślar’s Galeria Repassage, which he subsequently took over in 1978 and ran on his own for over a year. Grzegorz Kowalski, Wiktor Gutt, and Barbara Falender were figures with whom he worked frequently as a model or collaborator, and the writer and literary critic Wojciech Karpiński was among Jung’s long-time intellectual companions. Poetry was a constant necessity for Jung, who occasionally found himself incapable of painting at all. The 1980s saw Jung begin paying visits to Paris, where he grew close to the Polish emigre community connected with the literary journal “Zeszyty Literackie”—a magazine to which he contributed drawings. A longstanding, concurrently pursued area of activity for Jung had been painting, as part of which he had initially depicted children’s heads and flowers. Most of his painterly works illustrate nature and—most significantly—trees; these works were influenced by his connections with Polish colorists such as the painter and writer Józef Czapski. Another strand of his work, however, is comprised of portraits, particularly self-portraits. Moreover, Jung had himself photographed in front of one of David Hockney’s paintings at the Biennale de Paris in 1985—which inspired his quest to portray other men, as well. He based his drawings on photographs rather than live sitters, taking shots of models who assumed the poses that he had in mind. Toward the end of his short life, he redoubled his focus on painting—in which context he likewise based his output on photographs, these being of landscapes seen on his many trips through Central Europe. D.M., W.S.
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