An artist keeps his distance from people and the environment (1986)

Review of my exhibition at the Varissela Gallery in the Abend Zeitung 21.01.86 Nuremberg

Nuremberg Pictures of a Pole – Photo-graphics

            He once came to Nuremberg as a good friend of the first city artist Łukasik; he was recently honoured by Heinz Neidel’ in the Institute’s “Mitteilungen”; now he is present with many drawings and collages in the Varisella Gallery (Blumenthalstraße 7 – until 15 February): Jan Niksinski from Warsaw.

            The Nuremberg pictures – in which you can recognise relatively much – already lead you on the right track of this idiosyncratic way of seeing: by no means a homage to a beautiful, old city, but again and again the typical refractions, signals for broken relationships, which bring the artist at a distance to people and any environment.

            Street alignments and urban canyons, together with the people in them, must be refracted in shattered mirrors, repeatedly come up against barriers and blockades, are subject to diversions or end in dead ends. Compulsive crossing out makes Niksinski’s pictures demonstratively “unpalatable”, as it were, not only preventing them from being enjoyed, but also from holding on to associations that would like to arise here and there. “I am afraid of life” is one of the titles. It is the primal fears of the unhoused human being that the Pole gives shape to with remarkable graphic aplomb. As if he had to be afraid of his own perfection again . . .

-jak-