Collection

The Guardian Angel guards Paradise in Bródno Park, a garden planted by Paweł Althamer with the help of his friends in 2009.

Previously, Stańczak was mainly involved in modifying everyday objects: old wall units and bookshelves, kettles, worn out tights, funeral sashes, bedside tables or chairs. The artist subjected them to peculiar, brutal actions aimed at “reversing” an object, turning it inside out or “stripping it off the skin”. His art is imbued with a spiritual, even religious element, absent from the works by critical artists of his generation.

In 1996 Stańczak disappears from the art scene. He no longer takes part in exhibitions or present his new works and loosens his ties with the artistic community. The artist subjected them to peculiar, brutal actions aimed at “reversing” an object, turning it inside out or “stripping it off the skin”. An accidental meeting with Paweł Althamer, an old colleague from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, was the beginning of a new chapter in the artist’s life, and perhaps also a forecast of his return to the creation of tangible art.

If there be for him an angel,a mediator, one of the thousand, to declare to man what is right for him, and he is merciful to him, and says, ‘Deliver him from going down into the pit; I have found a ransom’.
Book of Job (Job 33)