Jerzy Truszkowski (born 1961)
Jerzy Trzuszkowski is a painter, performer, photographer, filmmaker as well as critic, curator and author of books and texts on art.
In 1986, graduated with a diploma from the Institute of Fine Arts of the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin; studied also at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Lublin. Exhibited work as well as photographic and film performance footage already in the early 1980s, marking his presence artistically around Lublin’s BWA as well as in Łódź and Warsaw. In Łódź, co-founder of underground artistic groups, such as Kultura Zrzuty [Chip-In Culture] (with the collective Łódź Kaliska, Zbyszko Trzeciakowski, Jacek Rydecki), or the later music and art group Sternenhoch with an artistic commune revolving around it (Zbigniew Libera, Barbara Konopka, Anna ‘Mirosawa’ Nowak, Jacek Rydecki, and others). Co-editor of artzines ‘Tango and ‘Halo halo’. Since 1984, assistant of the duo KwieKulik.
His painting, performance, photographic and film practice is a hard-line manifesto against ideological enslavement as well as an investigation and deconstruction of symbolic power As such, it has earned Truszkowski his reputation as a forerunner of the Polish ‘critical art’ of the 1990s. The artist often employed self-mutilation to amplify the message of his performances and works.
