Rafał Topolewski: Slumber
GRIMM is pleased to announce Slumber, a solo exhibition of new work by Rafał Topolewski at the Amsterdam gallery (NL). This series captures the hallucinatory state between sleep and wakefulness, an unsettling suspension of time and place where plants, portraits and landscapes lose definition and slip between figurative and abstracted motifs. Recurring images of clockfaces and the artist’s unblinking eye capture the uneasy feeling of operating outside of consciousness, of losing time and finding oneself out of step with reality.
The subjects of Topolewski’s paintings share an earthy, ochre-hued tone – capturing the strangeness of the crepuscular hours between day and night. This curious environment draws an allusion between the subjects of the paintings and Topolewski’s interest in states outside of sleep and wakefulness, where memories, dreams and reality blur together in the fragmentary language of his work. In this suggestible state, the artist’s work invites viewers to immerse themselves in an uncanny space where logic and reason give way to intuition and emotion.
A graduate of the Royal Academy Schools, London (UK), Topolewski’s distinctive style of working in oils with a dry brush evokes the appearance of a grainy photograph, a time-worn memory distanced from the sharpness of the moment. This uniquely painterly touch captures the act of remembering in the frame of each dreamlike painting that constitutes Slumber.
The photographic allusion of his work is further demonstrated in Topolewski’s use of a personal archive of photographs in addition to digital and print research from which he sources his subject matter. These references are digitally spliced, overlaid and manipulated collages that form the foundation of each painting. The process of painting itself takes an autonomous journey as the artist follows the idiosyncrasies and accidents of the medium to discover unexpected conclusions in the final work.
What might begin with a photograph of distinct moment in time is therefore subject to the process of painting – of capturing the act of reminiscence and revealing the psychological state that the image could suggest. This process is at the heart of Topolewski’s work; harnessing the strangeness of time, process and memory to capture and preserve a sensation, making tangible an ineffable idea in the half-light of the studio as the world sleeps on beyond.
About the artist
Rafał Topolewski (b. 1983, Grudziądz, PL) lives and works in Lisbon (PT). He studied Fine Art at the Royal Academy Schools in London (UK) and at the Manchester Metropolitan University (UK). Solo and group exhibitions include Interludes, Alice Amati, London (UK) in 2023; The Belly and the Guts, Alice Amati, London (UK) in 2023; In Three Acts, Huxley-Parlour, London (UK) in 2023; Becoming a Creature, Tabula Rasa Gallery, London (UK) in 2023; Castelet, Simo Bacar, Lisbon (PT) in 2022; Corpo e Mente, curated by Lawrence Van Hagen, Palazzo Barbaro, Venice (IT) in 2022; If not, Winter, Simo Bacar, Lisbon (PT) in 2022, Nudes and Dudes, Lundgren Gallery, Mallorca (ES) in 2020; Isle, Smart Objects Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (US) in 2018; Fully Awake, Blip Blip Blip, Leeds (UK) in 2017; Royal Academy Show, Royal Academy Schools, London (UK) in 2016 and Premiums, Royal Academy of Arts, London (UK) in 2015.
