NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian Gallery presents Discharge! (on display until February 19, 2011), a mise-en-scène of new paintings by Piotr Uklański. If painting is traditionally defined as an accretive practice whereby pigments are applied to blank canvas to produce marks, Uklański’s new work moves in the opposite direction. The process reveals a skepticism towards the act of painting that at the same time allows him to produce seductive pictorial results. Color is strategically removed — or discharged — from cotton bedsheets that have been saturated with vibrantly-hued fiber-reactive dyes. Bleach is the primary agent in this process that allows the creation of “paintings” without paint. The nature of this discharge method aligns this work with a legacy of anti-painting. Sharing affinities with Sigmar Polke’s fabric paintings and Blinky Palermo’s sewn cloth pictures (Stoffbilder) —