Grzegorz Kozera’s exhibition Modus Pasamondi is a painting and spatial installation created during the artist’s creative residency at Municipal Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz.
Meetings, conversations, walks, library searches, receiving guests and paying visits – the artist chooses from among the ever-growing and available information that which allows him to develop the classic phrase modus vivendi and interweave it with what is from here, from Bydgoszcz: it is the Modus clothing company and the Pasamon haberdashery factory.In exploring Bydgoszcz’s heritage, Kozera moves with particular attention among the various timelines: then, now, tomorrow, private and personal,public and universal. He hangs white cotton in the gallery space and with this simple gesture activates the multidimensionality of the place: the gallery, the painter’s atelier, the fitting room, the imagination’s undressing room, the dressing room– intermingle their functions. This arrangement of space is linked to the characteristic motifs of the artist’s paintings: the dress, the fabric, the fitting and the decision associated with the choice.

Because the world constantly offers us its threads. Do we choose them and how? We feel how life is weaving with the heart.

He fits the large-format paintings on industrial canvas into the gallery space and, at the same time, leaves them on the reel, with its natural weight and association with the weaving beam, in its potentiality, in the grasping of the moment, with the option for continuity and for revealing further patterns and designs, further threads of the multiculturalism of Bydgoszcz, connected both with the history and cultural heritage of the city, and with the cross-cultural competence of man, which always opens up to more life, to what appears, sometimes even very unexpectedly.
In thinking about the qualities of painting, the artist – with gratitude and respect for his roots as a student of the colourist Leon Tarasewicz – fully reconciled with himself follows his creative voice. He gives a personal tone to works created in a specific place, inspired by a specific city and its texts. In the attempt to approach the human being through fabric, there is a sensitivity to light, a memory of the skin, the shell, the uniform, an openness to certain shades, to the different stories drawn on the skin or written in the body, to the qualities of the colours that like impulses or stimuli interact with the human nervous tissue system.
Modus Pasamondi now sounds like the title of a film with a screenplay in the form of an exhibition, which, like a good plot, flows briskly and has its twists and turns. Kozera’s paintings, saturated with colours, flow through a homoerotic imagination, originating in the European cultural circle from the art of ancient Greece and Rome. From this intertwining of chromaticity with ars homo erotica, a new one emerges: chromeroticism, yes, it is a new word, born out of deliberation, in dialogue, out of a desire to embrace different qualities, out of a desire to make room for the personal in creative work, out of the lightness of creating words for an evolving reality, when entering the fitting room (cabine d’essayage), trying to get closer to the human, to the sentient, to the flare of feeling.

Grzegorz Kozera (born in 1983 in Warsaw) – Doctor of Arts, painter, author of collages. From 2003 to 2008, studied at the Faculty of Art History at the UKSW in Warsaw. From 2006 to 2011, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Rector’s degree with honours
in the Painting Space studio of Prof. Leon Tarasewicz and Dr. Paweł Susid. From 2017 to 2020, he studied for a doctorate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow in the studio of Prof. Grzegorz Sztwiertnia. He is, among other things, a two-time scholarship holder of the Office of the City of Warsaw (2014, 2016), laureate of the Young Poland Programme (2019) and awarded at the 42. Biennial of Painting “Bielska
Jesień” (2015). From 2020 working at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
as an assistant / www.grzegorz-kozera.pl

Grzegorz Kozera, Modus Pasamondi,
09.09.2022 – 01.10.2022, Municipal Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz, 3 Gdańska St.
as part of the Programme of Artistic Residence Programme at Municipal In Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz

Special thanks to Aleksandra Wika, CEO of Pasamon Sp. z o.o., and Bogna Derkowska-Kostkowska, Head of the Cultural Heritage Workshop of the Kujawsko-Pomorskie Cultural Centre in Bydgoszcz
Curators: Danuta Milewska, Karolina Rybka