Maciej Kość: Velvet Dawns

Maciej Kość (b. 2001 in Lodz, Poland) graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2024 and is now continuing his studies at the prestigious London’s Royal College of Art.

Velvet Dawns is his first solo exhibition at VETA by Fer Francés where he was invited for a residency over the summer: “I’ve tried to make the best of my extended VETA residence. The studio is not far from the Prado and the Thyssen and I’ve become as fascinated with their collections as anxious about their influence. How do you resist the pull of Paul de Vos’s Bull or Goya’s Dogs on a Leash? For breathing space, you have to withstand the pressure of Rubens’s Birth of the Milky Way.”

He works in mixed media — mostly acrylics (applied with airbrush) and soft pastels on either linen canvas or wooden panels, occasionally adding sculptural styrofoam elements and found objects.

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.

Velvet Dawns collects spectacular and empathetic portraits of animals, identifying them in complex individualities. By design, these are frequently rodents who find it hard to live down their reputation (sometimes caricatured in cartoonish smaller formats). But in Velvet Dawns as a whole, they are vindicated. The animals are at times timid and vaguely introverted. Others can be intensely curious, raptured by the skies, or regarding others with special attention. They betray rich subjectivities rarely read from animals’ faces, subjectivities marked by regret, wistfulness or grief. We find them huddled and timid, cautious and vulnerable but also poised and hopeful for redemption. Sometimes, Kość’s images suggest obscure narratives or complex fables standing behind his scenes. Above all, his portraits — posthumanist if you will — imbue his critters with special grace and melancholy. They may be relatively small in relation to the scale of their settings or just self-effacing, but their presence is increasingly felt. The viewers are counted on to notice the animals’ magic and beauty. Kość himself takes special delight in their charm, intensity and dignified manner as he spends long hours of wonder and absorption, developing his sublime worlds and multi-hued, light-infused velvet and plumaged beasts.