Łukasz Korolkiewicz

Łukasz Korolkiewicz (born 1948 in Warsaw) is a full Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he has taught painting since 1980 and led his own painting workshop since 1996. His current exhibition Experiment of Professor K. at the Czapski Palace | Academy Salon (September 26–October 31, 2024) showcases his decades-long career in contemporary Polish painting.

Korolkiewicz's work represents a distinctive blend of symbolic realism, new figuration, and hyperrealism, though he emphasizes painterly rather than photographic expression. Drawing inspiration from Polish modernists like Malczewski, Mehoffer, Podkowiński, and Wojtkiewicz, as well as international masters including Bonnard, Vuillard, Hockney, and Degas, his style is characterized by irony, grotesque elements, and an affinity for absurdity that travesties life's peculiar composition.

His artistic focus centers on existential themes through everyday situations and superficial impressions that build complex constructions filled with diverse meanings. Korolkiewicz transforms mundane bourgeois existence into a reserve of unhurried adventures, exploring the extraordinary within ordinary experiences like park walks, rustic vacations, and observing others. His work reveals what remains shadowed in daily life—unpredictable, imperceptible, and illusory elements—while examining fate's meanders, biological determinism, and sin in life's undercurrents.

• Award of the Independent Culture Committee of NSZZ Solidarity (1983)
• Jan Cybis Award (1991)
• US Information Agency Scholarship (1986)
• Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship (1986/1987)
• Kościuszko Foundation Fellowship (1990)

Korolkiewicz's paintings inhabit a space between eschatological weight and everyday existence, where Thanatos is present as a hard suggestion rather than a visible event. His work avoids dramatic theatrics while exploring themes of alienation, openness versus concealment, defensive mechanisms, pretense, and the art of pretending. The artist creates a multi-year treatise on being among specific people—on being alongside and together, being oneself and being an artist. His atmospheric paintings are enigmatic, dreamy, oneiric, decadent, and obsessive, reflecting life as a game marked by shadows, reflections, conventions, and uncertainty.