Piotr Uklanski: Fatal Attraction

Description

Art appreciators and museum-goers interested in both contemporary art and historical art references in the themes of love and death, as well as photography and photo-book aficionados will find Piotr Uklanski: Fatal Attraction especially engaging. A previously under-the-radar artist, recognisiton of the New-York based artist Piotr Uklanski (born Poland, 1968) is growing alonside this book, and exhibitions. Piotr Uklanski: Fatal Attraction accompanies two retrospective exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this year, Piotr Uklanski: Photographs and Piotr Uklanski: Selections from the Met Collection. Piotr Uklanski: Fatal Attraction presents images from the Met collection exhibition as well as an in-depth examination of Uklanski's photographic oeuvre. Rosetta Brooks's extremely readable essay place Uklanski's work into a mainstream cultural context, while Douglas Ecklund's essay focuses on his specific body of work, Joy of Photography.

Piotr Uklanski was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1968. He studied painting in the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and photography at the Cooper Union School for Advancement of Science and Art, in NY. Uklanski emerged on the New York art scene in the mid-90s with an emblematic artwork, the Untitled (Dance Floor), a sculpture that integrates the legacy of minimalism with the blurring of art and entertainment that characterizes the current era. Uklanski has since constructed a diverse body of work that exploits as many types of media (sculpture, photography, collage, performance, and film) as it promiscuously absorbs cultural references. His work has been internationally exhibited in various contexts including the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in NY, the 26th Sao Paolo Biennale 2004, Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others. Rosetta Brooks is a renowned critic and art historian. She was the founder and editor of Zg Magazine (1980-86) and currently founder and publisher at Zg Press. She is also on the faculty of Art Center in Pasadena. Douglas Ecklund is Curator of Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hermann Nitsch is an Austrian artist whose work draws parallels between religion and the ritualistic spiritualism of creativity.