New
York, NY – Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s phantasmagorical
paintings
roil with colorful mutant life: plants sprout eyeballs, bodies go about
their
business while sloughing off limbs and disgorging organs, and dense
vegetal
landscapes transform into visceral surgical tableaux. Vibrant and
perverse,
anthropomorphic and surreal, Ziolkowski’s private language is the
symbolic
expression of a highly concerted imagination that also was shaped by
life in a
very small town: Zamosc, where the artist was born in 1980, is a remote
Renaissance city that began as a fortress in the middle of the lush
Roztocze
plateau in southeast Poland. Here wild nature penetrates the edges of an

idealized urban microcosm that was once a center of intellectual life
and seat
of Eastern Europe’s Chasidic Jewish community, later stained by Nazi
atrocities,
and today is home to a concentration of food factories.