In 2026, Art : Concept launches Ménage à Trois, a new exhibition cycle dedicated to presenting, for the first time in France, the work of artists in collaboration with the galleries that represent them.
To inaugurate this new cycle, Art : Concept is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Jan Eustachy Wolski, in collaboration with Neue Alte Brücke. Titled after the Polish amalgam Powłoka, the exhibition takes its name from a term that does not fully yield itself to translation. Its semantic field spans notions of membrane, paint covering, film, and any surface that shelters from view, filters perception, or selectively reveals.
Unlike in prior works, the series veers from abstraction to figuration in a way that it grants near-equal weight. At times, solitary figures are paired with disorienting, chromatic fields; elsewhere, cityscapes get corrupted into congested, loose paint patches. While hinting at a post-industrialized world, the narrative aspects of the works engineer a decisive incompleteness as the figuration does not give way to resolved narratives, adumbrating the works with sustained ambiguity.
Wolski’s handling of texture with protruding paint, heavy impasto, and sweeping gestural strokes heightens the immediacy of the physical presence of paint. Anchored in bold colors, his painterly strategies relate an intentional tendency to sink the viewer into these worlds. Through a calculated interplay of fogged narratives, scrutiny of texture, and the unresolved duality of abstraction and figuration, Wolski foregrounds the skin of the painting as a physical and symbolic membrane through which the image and its meaning hesitate.
Wolski’s practice rests on a form of dystopian worldbuilding, marked by ambiguous representations that navigate early twentieth-century expression, superfuture aesthetics, and the legacy of abstract art, where narrative coalesces with painterly components in densely textured surfaces.
Jan Eustachy Wolski (b. 1997, Cracow, PL) lives and works in Cracow. He studied at the university of Applied arts in Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Recent solo exhibitions were presented at Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt, and Piktogram, Warsaw. He has exhibited his works in group exhibitions at Contemporary Art Center Vilnius, Modern Art, Paris, Piktogram, Warsaw, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Stefan Gierowski Foundation, Warsaw, and Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, among other spaces.
