Witold Stelmachniewicz (B. 1970), untitled (by Riefenstahl), 2009 - 2016

oil on canvas, 140 x 120 cm, signed on the reverse:
'WITOLD STELMACHNIEWICZ | 2009 - 2016'.

Witold Stelmachniewicz | Artist, born in Jaroslaw, has been associated with the Cracow community for years. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow at the Faculty of Painting, receiving a diploma with honors in the studio of Professor Zbigniew Grzybowski in 1996. Since 2013, he has held the position of professor at the Academy of Fine Arts. Since 2011, he has led the Drawing Studio, and since 2018, the Painting Studio, then assumes the position of Dean of the Faculty of Painting. He works with photography and video, but the central area of his artistic activity invariably remains painting. His works are a reference to the social situation, art, art history, historical events, the reception of media messages entwined with political conditions. The artist takes as a reference for his works well-known and universally recognizable media images, historically and politically loaded, which he then subjects to personal transformation and transposition, as it were, by crossing out and shifting their contemporary understanding, through applied changes, often in the form of multicolored impastos, contrasting with the basic fabric of the black and white reference. The work on display, which is part of the Opus dei series, comes from this current of Stelmachniewicz's work, about which the artist writes: "it is based on the assumption that past traumas affecting the present and future can only be healed by returning to the conflicts that caused them. Hence the preference for using materials that already exist, appropriating them as "dictated ready-made." Along the same lines, the artist used the motifs of images from Leni Reifenstahl's The Olympics, a film that was not a mere documentary about sports struggles. "[...] Every art is subject to political manipulation [...] except the one that speaks the same language of manipulation". Witold Stelmachniewicz is the author of more than a dozen solo exhibitions and participant in dozens of group shows in Poland, Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary and Ukraine, among others. The artist's works are in the collection of the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow and in private collections at home and abroad.