Kamil Kukla’s exhibition, titled “Gracious Epoch,” presents paintings created between 2022 and 2025. The artist’s latest paintings expand on themes present in his earlier projects, while shifting them into distinctly darker realms. Kukla’s paintings feature organic structures, fragmented bodies, forms resembling fossils or biological conglomerates, as well as scenes drawn from everyday life, which, under the influence of painterly transformation, take on a disturbing, almost hallucinatory character.
The exhibition’s title carries a distinct irony. “The Gracious Epoch” is a concept evoking a time of favorable conditions for the development of life, which, in the context of the present day, sounds like a bitter diagnosis. The climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, and political and migration tensions form the backdrop for the emerging paintings, though they do not appear in them directly. The artist treats painting as a record of inner states: premonitions, dreams, and visions that emerge at the intersection of private and collective experience.
A defining feature of his practice is the tension between paintings that emerge from a specific motif and those that arise through pure improvisation. Some of his works are based on photographs, reproductions, or fragments of paintings found in museums. Other paintings develop spontaneously, from a single splash of color or a single gesture. In such moments, painting becomes an almost biological process: the form grows, branches out, and mutates, and chance plays just as significant a role as the artist’s conscious decision.
“Gracious Epoch” can thus be read as a reflection on the fragility of the historical moment in which we find ourselves. Kukla evokes distant geological and biological eras, reminding us that the history of life on Earth is a series of accidents, catastrophes, and unexpected turns. In this light, the present appears as a moment suspended between a window of opportunity that still exists and a premonition of its imminent closure.
Patrycja Rup