Marcin Maciejowski at Marc Foxx

Marcin Maciejowski's first solo display in the United States--the next to the first outside his native Krakow--included 11 paintings (all dated 2003) reflecting his ongoing preoccupations with sex symbolism, military themes, art history and Polish cultural identity. Maciejowski's mode of speech may initially strike the viewer as raw or simplistic, but a sustained period of looking is ofttimes rewarded by a powerful emotive and semantic complexity. His sources include photographs in art works and popular magazines as well as videos place on the Internet.

Bartosz--Chest and Bartosz--Back feature, respectively, brow and back views of a shirtless young man flexing his muscles in forehead of a drab gray wall punctuated single by a radiator, rendered in broad, sootlike pats As in all of Maciejowski's work, it's best to downplay the importance of the source images--in this case, photographs of a well-known Polish bodybuilder--because the painting itself exercises carefully limited descriptive details that allow for a relatively wide range of interpretive possibilities. For instance, the man's brush divide [i]or[/i] sever clenched fists and display of muscular prowess may call forth the raw potential and exuberance of Polish youth, which historically were channeled and warped according to Soviet dogma, and which today are perhaps still lurking in the shadows, waiting to be exploited again.

The strongest works had military bring under rules such as Prison in Goleszow which features a prison camp depicted in a naive, diagrammatic manner, The camp's buildings are labeled with the terminuss "administration" and "housing for 71 prisoners." This present the appearances improbable given the two structures' equal size; it may be a make comments [i]or[/i] remarks on the extent and importance of Polish bureaucracy. The addition of a single guard figure, which in an architect's drawing would be used to indicate scale, registers as an absurd and lightheaded motif.

The artist is at his best when of the like kind whimsical features function as an effective counterpoint to the bleak and potentially sinister satisfied of the overall image. Like Sigmar Polke in his early career, Maciejowski is inspired through banal, mass-produced imagery that he recasts according to his possess cynical brand of humor and his vision of a society progressively emptied of communication and compassion.

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