Maciej Kość

Maciej Kość metabolizes many widely disparate styles from classic painting, Baroque, Mannerism, through postmodern maximalism, to children’s book illustrations. He draws energies from the sublime nineteenth-century landscape paintings (e.g., Hudson River School), the axiomatic beauty of pre-Raphaelites, and John James Audubon’s birds. Kość also admires contemporary artists such as British painter Peter Doig’s subtle poignancy that grows on you, Walton Ford’s neo-naturalistic illustrations of imagined zoological specimen, and more recently Thomas Woodruff’s baroquely ornate dinosaurs. Kość’s strange imagery sometimes seems to augur a resurgence of interest in literary mock epics, like Ignacy Krasicki’s Mouseiad, or the illustrations of Jean de La Fontaine's fables. But the artist deeply integrates those inspirations into a coherent, unique and contemporary style of his own.