Rafał Topolewski

Smoulder

Marking his latest series of paintings and drawings, the exhibition navigates the liminal states between waking and sleep, interiority and observation, memory and materiality. Drawing on dreams, rituals, and deeply personal routines, Rafał Topolewski constructs scenes that feel at once tender and disquieting. Faces—often his own—emerge and dissolve within quietly unsettling compositions, while botanical forms, electrical cords, ears, droplets, and fragments of domestic life hint at an obsessive cataloguing of sensory experience. At the heart of this exhibition lies an interest in falling: falling into sleep, into thought, or into the self. As Topolewski notes, “falling is a word that sounds gentle when attached to sleep, but when you separate it, it becomes something far more aggressive.”

The works suggest a complex emotional terrain: the nurturing of thoughts and images both healing and invasive. Recurring motifs such as the peony—a naïvely proposed symbol of good fortune—and the thistle—at once a weed and medicine—anchor this duality, appearing throughout the works as metaphors for psychological balance and imbalance.

Topolewski's process begins with a personal archive of photographs, sometimes merged with digital research or art historical references. These references are often manipulated into digital collages before being transferred to linen. Yet the painting process itself resists control: working in oil with a dry brush technique, the artist allows chance and materiality to shape the final image. The resulting surfaces evoke photographic memory, lost clarity, and emotional residue.

This exhibition features new large-scale canvases and smaller, intimately scaled works, as well as a selection of pencil-inflected drawings that reflect the delicate line between documentation and dissolution. In each, a soft, burnt sienna-hued palette and stippled textures conjure the dreamlike atmosphere unique to Topolewski’s work. Clock faces merge with landscapes; glassy-eyed figures become indistinct; objects become metaphors for subconscious fears, compulsions, and coping mechanisms.

For enquiries regarding the featured works or for more information,
please email: enquiry@grimmgallery.com