Exhibition of the 14th Geppert Competition

In this year’s edition of the Geppert Competition, we will not ask, as in previous years, what a painter does or what artists do for painting. We will not consider whether we need paintings or not. For we believe – perhaps naively – that we still need art. Especially in a world on fire.

The 14th Geppert Competition is aimed at artists who use the medium of painting as the basis for their work, and who received their degree from an art college between 2018 and 2022. The structure of the event consists of two elements: a qualifying symposium and a competition exhibition. During the symposium, experts – Dominika Kowynia, Tomasz Kalitko, Jarosław Jeschke, Zuzanna Dolega, Alicja Klimczak-Dobrzaniecka, Małgorzata Szymankiewicz, Waldemar Tatarczuk, Monika Szewczyk, Marcin Polak, Aleksy Wójtowicz and Magdalena Ujma-Gawlik – put forward the candidacies of three, in their opinion, most interesting female and male painters, presenting their profiles and achievements to date. From this group, through closed deliberations, the jury, consisting of Iwona Bigos, Karol Radziszewski, Jadwiga Sawicka, Krzysztof Stanisławski and Andrzej Zdanowicz, selected the finalists who are taking part in the competition exhibition.

The jury composed of: Iwona Bigos, Karol Radziszewski, Jadwiga Sawicka, Krzysztof Stanisławski and Andrzej Zdanowicz selected the following people for the exhibition of the 14th Geppert Competition:

This year, the medium used interests us less than the artists who create in it. We are particularly interested in their emotions, experiences, dreams and desires, in a word, everything that initiates the creation of a work. Exceptions to the painting rule are assemblages (Natalia Karczewska), animations (Klaudia Prabucka) or multimedia work (Hanna Shumska), drawing from painting or complementing the artists’ painting series. The curators, Joanna Kobyłt (BWA Wrocław) and Marlena Promna (ASP Wrocław), do not view the exhibition as an attempt to depict a generational landscape, but rather as a peek into the painting worlds of several individuals working in very distinctive styles. Although the personal motifs, the painting techniques and the working strategies of these female and male artists are quite different, the curators can see one common denominator. The content of the works of the seven finalists was created somewhere between heart and head, anxiety and intimacy, pain and love. If, in turn, one were to look from a meta-level at the content and form of the works present at the exhibition, one would notice that figuration and the human figure dominate. In the era of post-human narratives, so intensely developed by contemporary art, the human being seems surprisingly important here.