For the past twenty years, Andrzej Zieliński’s artworks have depicted the technological devices on which humanity has come to depend—gadgets that transmit, store, encrypt, and erase both our individual and collective data.

Departing from the approaches of his contemporaries, Zielinski explores technology through traditional media rather than actual devices. Instead, he has chosen the traditional modes of art making: painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture to break down the polished surface of the phones, laptops, ATMs, and drones, exposing their contradictions. His work encapsulates the elegance of streamlined interfaces and the clunkiness of experimental research and development. His works align the past, present, and future of these devices, making them both in and out of sync with the high-tech world they represent. Zielinski states, “I play with notions of updating, product design, interface, security, and entertainment through visual and material paradoxes that disrupt cohesive, generalised definitions and expectations.” His work teeters between control and collapse, obsolescence and permanence, thereby reflecting the paradoxes of a society dependent on technological gadgetry. Zielinski’s works of art resist seamless integration into the world of mass production and consumerism and carve out a space for us to pause and reflect on them.

It is the viewer’s imagination that breathes new life into these machines, transforming them into something entirely different and unexpectedly personal. Individually, his works of art seem imbued with their own essence, perhaps as a prelude to the AI age closing in. Through this exploration of technology’s physical and psychological impact, Zielinski raises important questions about how we interface with data and reality.

Andrzej Zieliński received a Master of Fine Arts in Painting & Printmaking from Yale University. Zieliński’s solo exhibitions include: Indoor Habitat at Emporia State University, Kansas; Connected: Relationships with Machines at Mattatuck Museum, Connecticut (2017); Primary Data at Gallery 9, Sydney (2016); Open Sourced at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas (2015); and You Are Disconnected, Would You Like to Proceed? at Mottahedan Projects, Dubai (2014).

Group shows include: Tagging (your mine!) at Monade Gallery, Kyoto (2025), Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Missouri (2022); The Lawrence Lithography Workshop, Nebraska (2022); Megalo Gallery, Canberra (2019); The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas (2019); and the Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra (2018).

Zieliński‘s work is held in numerous public collections, such as the Mattatuck Museum, Portland Art Museum, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Daum Museum, Canberra Museum and Gallery, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Featured Works

Primary Data

Open Sourced

BOMB Magazine

Andrzej Zielinski: Joe Fyfe on the place between abstraction and caricature, where Andrzej Zielinski’s paintings reside

Artforum

Andrzej Zieliński
Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

KC Studio

Andrzej Zielinski: Open Sourced

Open Sourced


Year: 2016
Publisher: Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art / Johnson County Community College
Edition: First Edition
Language: English
Details: 162 pages

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