A new exhibition by the painter Jakub Tytykalo (1984), put together especially for Bold Gallery, presents not only a set of his paintings from the past two years, but also reveals for the first time how he conceptualizes his artistic thinking. Both are referred to by the exhibition title Sidewinding, a term from herpetology, the science that focuses on amphibians and reptiles. “Sidewinding” is an unusual way in which snakes move across unstable surfaces like desert sand or mud, where they don't crawl forward in a straight line, but rather move sideways using undulating loops. For Jakub Tytykalo, it is possible to see a similar "no-directness" in the sense of heading off the beaten path in his searches for a different form of painting expression, which is uncharacteristically constructed through design drawings, sculptural perceptions of a shape, and, more recently, collage-style glued photographs. In addition, his contemporary expression deliberately takes a "detour" through avant-garde and the modernist visual experience. This convoluted exhibition is exceptional in that it captures the transition from sparse colour to casual colorism to an extent unprecedented for Tytykalo. In addition, the exhibition features the premiere of several objects which transform paintings into a spatial form by deconstructing flat designs. Mythology is the primary thematic keystone of the exhibition, but whether the mythology is ancient or personal, in this case, we see the artist’s reinterpretation of the original patterns, in which neither snake-like curves nor hints of fine sand dunes are missing.
Radek Wohlmuth
Exhibition Curator
