Anatomy of the Imagination
Exhibition Review
Jan Kawecki’s artistic practice grows out of a persistent need to draw and paint which, as the artist himself emphasises, has endured despite the experiences and adversities he has encountered along the way. In this context, the title of the exhibition takes on an almost literal meaning. Jan’s Enduring Collection is not merely a body of works that has survived, but a process that continues despite loss, constantly beginning anew.
Kawecki constructs a world of his own, dense with visions, bodily distortions and unsettling hybrids. In his pen drawings in particular, he builds up the surface of the image with remarkable consistency, using a fine, almost obsessive line. Individual figures often become part of larger organic structures in which it is difficult to draw a boundary between the human body, vegetation, animal forms and something entirely fantastical. The violet tones present in some of the works further enhance the sense of a world suspended somewhere between dream and reality.
His paintings employ a similar approach to the construction of the figure, while introducing the expressive potential of colour and material. Bodies are distorted, at times grotesque, yet rendered with an attentiveness that prevents them from being reduced to mere fantastical creatures. In some works, recognisable situations are shifted towards an uncertain reality, as though the everyday world had been subjected to an unfamiliar logic.
These works evoke elements of Wojciech Siudmak’s fantastic realism, particularly in their treatment of the human figure and their construction of worlds poised between physical reality and imagination. There are also echoes of Zdzisław Beksiński in the distorted bodies, sombre atmosphere, organic structures and figures that appear at once human and otherworldly. This is not, however, a matter of direct imitation. In Kawecki’s work, the fantastic is more restless, immediate and untamed. His paintings retain the traces of an intense process of making, of successive lines, marks and layers being applied, as though the form itself were only gradually revealing itself through the act of creation.
A defining feature of Kawecki’s work is the tension between detail and distortion. On the one hand, he demonstrates considerable attention to anatomy, texture and the details of representation; on the other, he consistently pushes beyond the boundaries of realistic depiction. It is precisely in this fracture between the recognisable and the imagined that the distinctive visual language of his work emerges.
In the text accompanying the exhibition, the artist speaks openly about mental illness and the experiences that have accompanied him throughout his life. His works should not, however, be understood solely as illustrations of those experiences. Their strength lies precisely in their resistance to simple explanations. Above all, they reveal a consistently developed visual language in which imagination, the observation of the body and the world around him, and the need to create converge in a whole that is difficult to define unequivocally.
Jan’s Enduring Collection is therefore an exhibition about creation as a form of continuity. After the loss of hundreds of earlier drawings, what remains is what matters most to the artist: the need to reach once again for a pen, a pencil or a brush. The works that follow are not so much a reconstruction of a lost collection as its continual creation anew.
Jan Kawecki
Jan’s Enduring Collection
On view: 8 – 31 January 2026
Property of the Lublin Theater Therapy Foundation. All rights reserved.
Realized with financial support from the City of Lublin