Leica 6x7 Gallery cordially invites to the “Pureview" Exhibition by Przemek Dzienis.

Landscape has proven to be a long-time inspiration for the photography. This comes both from an eternal human need to document one’s surroundings and from historical connection between photography and painting. Until 1970s, this relationship remained a tumultuous one: full of enmity and reproaches, it consisted, among other things, of efforts to elaborate new approaches to the common legacy of the two domains.

The works by Przemek Dzienis to be shown in Leica Gallery give a perfect example of the newest turn in this historical relationship. Landscapes created by the artist with use of a photographic camera captivate with their minimalism and abstract-painting gestures through which the artist adds colour. For Dzienis, snow is the perfect canvas – it is both delicate and surprisingly textured. The snow fills the cadres almost entirely.

Przemek Dzienis has been known for several projects which differ from the one to be shown in the exhibition. It was a conscious decision. ‘I got fed up with commercial work in Warsaw, with the speed, crowds. So I left. I went to seek peace. In monochromatic winter I have found colour’ – says Przemek Dzienis.

The “range” used by the artist in the title of the exhibition should mean skilful composition of details of snowy landscapes with photographs where mountain tops are clearly visible. In this way, the cycle consists both of elements of abstraction and those of classic landscape. With such balance, as well as with staining of white surface of the pictures, a spectator needs to engage an effort to understand the kind of landscape he encounters.

Dzienis’s works show conscious decision to reduce available means of plastic expression. A new effect is added to the usually strikingly high technical quality of Dzienis’s realisations. It’s a skilful awakening of delight in front of a beautiful snowy landscape. The same kind of delight has been evoked by, for example, Edward Weston’s shootings of America’s national parks.

Dzienis’s intervention in naturally created landscape through adding colours brings up associations with legacy of liberally conceived land art – for which the main material of work was the natural space and the installations it produced were often available to spectators only through photography. The painting gesture itself, as it is used by Przemek Dzienis, opens anew the definition of photography as ‘painting with light’, given by one of the photography’s pioneers, Henry Fox Talbot. What remains the most important here is the colour itself put against the landscape. A new element in Przemek Dzienis’s work – apart from his interest in landscape and in working outside of a studio – is multidimensionality. As a result, some flat photographs hanging on the gallery’s walls become tridimensional objects.

The Leica Gallery presentation is a premiere display of the new project by Przemek Dzienis.

Curator of the exhibition: Jakub Śwircz

Przemek (Przemek) Dzienis, born 1984 in Lodz, a Photography graduate in Director of Photography and Television Production Department of The Film School in Lodz.

Dzienis creates works that are simple in form, yet precise in composition. He steers away from pathos and overinterpretation. In his working Dzienis comes close to sculpture and object and evades inspirations stemming from classical painting. He reduces his means of expression to absolute minimum in order to facilitate the reception of the visual communication. The relations and tensions between objects, as well as composition of the cadre, are of the utmost interest of Dzienis’s. People - their stories, experiences and emotions – remain outside the scope of interest of the photographer, so that in his newest cycles they gradually cease to appear.

Dzienis’s photographs were presented in solo shows in Budapest, Warsaw, Cracow, Lodz and Poznan. He also took part in collective exhibitions in Warsaw, Vienna and Dusseldorf. He lives and works in Warsaw.