Piotr Uklanski

Piotr Uklański was born in Warsaw in 1968. His education includes studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and at Cooper Union in New York, reflecting a rich experience that spans painting and photography.

He emerged in the New York art scene in the mid-1990s. Known for his ability to explore a wide range of media—including photography, sculpture, video, performance, and cinema—his work is characterized by a combination of cultural and visual references that deconstruct stereotypes of popular culture with irony and incisiveness. The artist cleverly examines pressing themes such as death and sex, along with their entanglement with politics, media, and the oppression of the Soviet regime in Poland.

One of his recent reflections, exhibited in 2020 at Belmont Chapel in Rhode Island, focused on the sensuality and sexuality of the female figure derived from the Pre-Raphaelite tradition. Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Siddal, Jane Morris, and others appear in his canvases not merely as mysterious incarnations of beauty, but as part of a sisterhood. A notable example is Untitled (Mary Emma Jones as Proud Maisie), which is part of the collection. The subject, with her voluptuous red hair—typical of the medieval representation of diabolical beauty—loses the angelic appearance of a muse, transposing her being into a disturbing and enigmatic dimension. The woman is no longer a passive subject, a mere inspiration for the artist who depicts her, but a world unto herself, whose nature is yet to be fully explored.