In the Beta Gallery at the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, the exhibition ‘Andrzej Żygadło. Fullness’. The artist is known for portraying landscapes ‘with scars’, showing places where absence and lack become tangible. In his paintings, focused on the land of the Lemkos and Boykos, what is as important as what is on the canvas is what cannot be seen: lost landscapes, non-existent villages or demolished Orthodox churches. The artist’s works can be seen until the seventh of September 2025.
Andrzej Żygadło’s solo exhibition Fullness presents two painting series: Chram and Cerkwisko. The immediate source of inspiration for the paintings was the area of today’s Polish-Ukrainian borderland, from which the author hails, i.e. the region of Lemkivshchyna and Bojkovshchyna. Most of the works are set in the context of historical places and events.
The leading themes in Żygadło’s work are landscape, architecture and figures whose images have been transferred from archival photographs. For many years, the artist has been collecting family histories, talking to borderland residents and browsing through archives, all of which influence his work. His art is a story about the past, often difficult due to political and ideological tensions.
Żygadło’s works depict landscapes bearing the traces of destruction and loss, and tell of people suspended between presence and emptiness.
Żygadła’s first experience of a landscape after a destroyed temple is linked to the artist’s childhood and his stay in a sanatorium. The health path in Rymanów-Zdrój, which the patients used to walk, led through the area of the non-existent village of Wołtuszowa, on a trail running through the forest next to the Orthodox church, near the cemetery. This encounter with emptiness, absence and, at the same time, with the ethnographic and natural richness of the area became, over time, an impulse to develop a synthetic language of painting,” reads the curator’s description of the exhibition.
The exhibition consists of two painting series: Chram and Cerkwisko. Although both series draw on similar inspirations, they differ in their approach to documenting and depicting non-existent temples. In the Chram series, the artist transfers a landscape onto the canvas, into which he incorporates fragments of architecture with detailed precision. Cerkwisko, on the other hand, was created using contemporary photographs. One painting from this series is presented at the exhibition: Cerkwisko, Rożniatów. In this painting, the canvas is filled with a landscape, in the centre of which the artist has placed a black square as a symbol of a window, gate or door. This is a reference to eschatological symbolic representations and transience. The square’s geometric form, reminiscent of Malevich’s suprematism, contrasts with the softness of nature, sharpening the tension between tradition and the avant-garde.
The titles of the paintings refer to specific places and dates, reflecting the artist’s research process and indicating sources of inspiration. On the one hand, the paintings evoke shrines, while on the other they do not show them. This is a deliberate move in an attempt to capture the process of erasure of history. What remains of the destroyed temples is a void – filled by nature, fragments of meadows, paths and fields.
Alongside landscape, architecture is an important motif in Żygadła’s work. The church is the ideological axis of the artist’s work, who defines it with the term ‘chram’ borrowed from the Orthodox Slavic language. The architecture is reproduced with meticulous precision, but only in fragments – there are chapels, gates, sacred figures. Like the figures appearing in the paintings, they are taken from archive photographs.
Andrzej Żygadło has developed a painting language whose character can be described as almost meditative. The melancholic colour palette he uses – delicate greys, greens and blues – embeds his works in an ambiguous environment, suspended between the past and a projection of the imagination. He draws on a variety of sources – oral history, photography, nature – which he subjects to his own painterly rigour. The motif of the decay of the temple has a dimension of existential reflection. The search for the metaphysical element becomes the overarching, unifying motif of the exhibition Fullness,” concludes Mirosława Bałazy, curator of the exhibition.
Andrzej Żygadło. Fullness
Exhibition duration: until 7.9.2025
Venue: Beta Gallery, MOCAK
Curator: Mirosława Bałazy
photographs: Paulina Michałowska
source: MOCAK
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