Andrzej Zielinski · Open Sourced

Stone, wood, metal and plastic! Mastering these materials is an integral part of the timeline of human history. This mastery has allowed the development of the remarkable technologies we live with today, i.e., computers, satellites, mobile phones and lunar rovers. These technologies are ongoing fascinations for me, and they are subject matter of the sculptures in Open Sourced.

Artists’ mastery over their surroundings has evolved over time, and has been expressed in infinite ways. With no obvious practical function, art lends itself to various interpretations and manifestations. Art is the sphere where an individual can channel experiences within his or her time and space, attempting to mark time and space more accurately than any other form of communication. The artist is aware that individual experience can be a powerful way to express shared experience in one’s own time, in one’s own culture.

I think of my paintings and sculptures as having the ability to loom in an atmosphere capable of ”emailing and sending texts“ to the past as well as to the future. In contrast to a lot of my contemporaries, painting and sculpture are for me physical realities resulting from handcrafted traditional processes, rather than machine-made and marketed products.

I want my artwork to be universally readable, portraying ubiquitous objects based on generic design templates that have become the modern vernacular of our daily lives. We are, after all, consumers of all the same abundant and omnipresent gadgets.

I’m exploring the possibility that my artwork is a visual software program where the imagination of the viewer stands at its core and is the programmer. I want my work to be steadfast but malleable, permanent yet flexible, and, in essence, classical. Furthermore, I want them to capture the threatening shadow that accompanies my subject matter while simultaneously giving them a sense of humanity. If my works are in fact a visual software, I want them to be as if they have downloaded our own human DNA.

— Andrzej Zielinski, 2015

American artist Andrzej Zielinski was born in 1976 in Kansas City, Missouri. He studied art and art history at JCCC and at the University of Kansas, and in 2002 he received a BFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2004 he earned an MFA in painting from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Soon after graduating, Zielinski first showed at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, in a group exhibition in 2004, and in 2005, his work was featured in Greater New York, P.S.1/MoMA. His first solo exhibition was Control, Option, Shift at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York, and he had several subsequent shows there and also DCKT Contemporary. He participated in the JCCC Gallery of Art’s final exhibition, Homecoming in 2006/2007. Zielinski recently has exhibited locally with the Lawrence Lithography Workshop, Dolphin Fine Art and Haw Contemporary, Kansas City, Missouri, and numerous international galleries including Mottahedan Projects, Dubai, UAE; Gallery 9, Sydney, Australia; and Motus Fort, Tokyo, Japan.

Zielinski’s work is in numerous private collections as well as the collections of the Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra, ACT, Australia; and the Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon. The Nerman Museum has eleven works in its permanent collection including a sculpture from his student years, at JCCC.