17.09.2009, at 6 p.m.

 

Presentation one of Poland’s first conceptual artists – Wiesław Hudon. His artistic activity has been developing for over 40 years, and as the artist himself says: “is researching reality from the photographical perspective”. Since 1970, he has also been using a video camera. At that time, his recordings – time registrations: “two seconds of standing”, “pretending to be a bird” were created. His artistic activity in those days was characterized by conceptual tautology and the research for unauthenticity. He wanted to create a new, neo-avant-garde language of art, today known as conceptual. The road which began with “Total documentation” – shown in Warsaw in 1970 – led straight to deeper reflections about the nature of time and duration. Those creative areas were touched upon by the experimental movie, at that time a new cinematic genre developing mainly in France.
Sequence of separate pictures contains in itself new narrative potentials. The following years brought, as the artist claims, new questions and doubts. His extreme anti-conceptualism presented in his art was called by Hudon “humble, film-like documentary”.
His come-back to classical photography led to the creation of “memory loop” notion – the come-back to the same pictures in new reality contexts. “Traveling Artist” – a retrospective exhibition by Wieslaw Hudon in Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz (2004) – closes, but also opens new areas of travel to the future and to the past.