Marcin Dudek’s sculptural practice follows enclosed spaces – how we make them and how we interact with them when they are made. Dudek himself grew up in the housing estates that can be found across Poland, and his irritation with these flats was not so much to do with their sizes as with their repetition. An attempt to escape the mundane is a recurring theme in Dudek’s work, whether applied to the surface of a canvas or to the gallery space itself.
Dudek’s current investigation is concerned with the tunnels used by drug smugglers along the US-Mexican border and the Cu Chi tunnels excavated by the Vietcong during the Vietnam War.
In I Will Eat This Sleepy Town (2011), Dudek has unearthed a tunnel that led the visitor across the gallery in a peculiar and convoluted path. This construction, made from little more than packaging tape, became an imposing and solid conduit for the visitor’s movement and thought from the surface to the antipodean’s interior. The tunnels are an extended version of the painting works – in which the canvas itself is three-, if not four-dimensional How to rumble painting (2007), where the viewer could actually climb into the canvas of and emerge, via a lift, on another level of the gallery. The varied dimensionality is perhaps caused by the fact that Dudek’s installation is somewhat like a peculiar Möbius strip – an object in which the inside and outside are on the same surface. Emerging from the underpass, the viewer sees its exterior, a dense, sticky wall that gives no sense of liberation and opens no space. An earlier work, Pumping Station (2008), led Dudek to twenty-four railway terminals across Europe. The journey itself created a map of human transits, and in each location, the artist installed a temporary public sculpture made of rubber bicycle inner tubes, entangled and pumped up to different shapes and pressures. While the appearance of the conduit changed with time and location, the relationship between the external and internal surfaces of the object remained the same, much like in the parcel-tape, walk-in cylinder in I Will Eat This Sleepy Town.
Born 1979, Krakow, Poland
Lives and works in London and Brussels
Education:
2005 - 2007 MA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art, London
2001 - 2005 University of Art Mozarteum, Salzburg
Awards:
2009 IPJ Prize for digital arts, Portugal
2008 The Juliet Gomperts Trust London, Project Grant
2004 Scholarship from the Graphic Workshop, Traklhaus Salzburg
2003 Scholarship of the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts Salzburg
Selected projects:
2012, Winter Pavilion, Waterside Contemporary, London,
2011, Exico, 16th Biennial of Cerveira, Portugal tt
Cellar Television, Vienna Art Fair with Waterside Contemporary
I Will Eat This Sleepy Town, Waterside Project Space, London
Project of Absorbing the Other, Galerie8, London
2010, Kopalnia,T1+2 Gallery, London
2009, Art in an Ephemeral Age, The Art Festival at Hay
Mostra XV Bienal de Arte de Cerveira, LX Factory, Lisboa
XV Bienal de Cerveira Vila Nova de Cerveira, Portugal
Transfer, Galeria Sub-Carturesti Bucharest
2008, Pumping Station, Project Supported by Matt’s Gallery London
Visions in the Nunnery, The Nunnery Gallery, London
2007, Out of the frying Pan into the Fire, Espace Uhoda, Liege
XIV Bienal de Cerveira Vila Nova de Cerveira, Portugal
11.472, Bargehouse Oxo Tower Wharf, London
2006, Laboratory, Project Hoe, London
Multiplier, Whiteclub Space 1, Salzburg
Identikit, Temporary Contemporary Gallery, London
Marcin Dudek is represented by Waterside Contemporary. All images courtesy of the artist and Waterside Contemporary.
