Kraków–Leipzig residency exchange program „Flux“

Opening and artist talk: 13.11.2025 / 20:00
Exhibition: 14.11.–06.12.2025

Michał Sroka’s practice moves fluidly between the dense, tactile world of painting and the spare, ascetic clarity of drawing. His works created in Leipzig reveal a consistent interest in structure, rhythm, and process, but explored through very different material and visual languages.

Michał Sroka: Merz Drawings

In painting, Sroka emphasizes materiality. Thick layers of paint are structured into repetitive grooves and ridges, giving the canvas a relief-like quality. These surfaces oscillate between order and disruption: linear systems attempt to impose structure, yet color bursts through, unsettling the rhythm. The result is painting not as window onto the world, but as surface of memory, an accumulation of gestures, traces, and erosion. The works resonate with the industrial and graphic heritage of Leipzig, evoking the rhythm of machines, print matrices, or the layered decay of factory walls.

In contrast, the drawings reduce expression to a single, fragile line. Here the body appears fragmented, dislocated, sometimes headless, sometimes fused with objects. These figures echo the legacy of surrealism and anatomical illustration, but are stripped of explanatory context. They are both precise and absurd, unsettling in their simplicity. Where the paintings overwhelm with material density, the drawings open up space for projection and ambiguity.

Michał Sroka: Stratygrafia (2016)

Together, these two modes form a compelling dialectic. The paintings embody weight, resistance, and sedimentation; the drawings expose fragility, incompleteness, and the uncanny. Both share a fascination with process and with the instability of form, whether it is paint that slips out of order or bodies that no longer hold together. Sroka’s practice thus inhabits a space between matter and line, chaos and control, memory and forgetting, offering works that are intensely physical yet open to interpretation.

Statement from the artist:

“My research explores the relationship between art and space, also understood as architecture. In my doctoral work I analysed definitions of space from sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology, and their artistic significance.

I study how artists define and use space, focusing on exhibitions, artworks, and strategies such as assembly, gesamtkunstwerk, or sculptural architecture. Key research areas include ruins, gaps, and non-places — structures shifting the relation between object and space.

My practice unites painting, sculpture, and installation through architectural elements. Although rooted in architectural education, my work relies more on intuitive, plastic impulses than on design rules, placing it at the intersection of architecture, sculpture, and painting.”

About the artist:

Michał Sroka is a visual artist, architect and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. He has taken part in over 100 exhibitions in Poland and abroad (Germany, Czech Republic, UK, Austria, and Hungary) and in study visits to the USA, Germany, France, Norway, Israel, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Collaborated with institutions such as Bunkier Sztuki, Cricoteka, Photomonth Festival, Museum of Warsaw, as well as the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Since 2021 Sroka co-manages the PIANA Foundation and Gallery. His practice includes painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, design, and multimedia. Central theme: relationships between painting, architecture, sculpture, and space.

Veranstalter: Kombinat e.V. & PIANA Gallery in Kooperation mit dem Polnischen Institut Berlin – Filiale Leipzig und der Europäischen Stiftung der Rahn Dittrich Group für Bildung und Kultur

Veranstaltung auf Facebook
Info: instagram.com/michalsroka, pianagallery.com, instagram.com/kombinat.studiospace
Eintritt: frei
Öffnungszeiten: Di–Fr 10:00–16:00 Uhr und zu Veranstaltungen
Ort: Polnisches Institut, Markt 10, 04109 Leipzig

Abbildungen © Michał Sroka / PIANA Gallery

Programm des Polnischen Instituts: