Landscape as Painting lecture: Christian Tomaszewski, “Architecture of the False”

Christian Tomaszewski is a Polish-born, Brooklyn-based visual artist. He holds an M.F.A degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland and was an artist-in-residence in such programs and places as the American Academy in Rome, Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, International Studio and Curatorial Program in the New York City, and Artpace in San Antonio, TX.

His work belongs mainly to the categories of sculpture, installation, and video art, and is informed by studies and interest in cinema, architecture and design, and in manipulating and recontextualization of various elements or ingredients borrowed from these disciplines. Tomaszewski creates complex environments that aim at transforming viewer’s experience and perception, devising moments of suspension or temporary confusion.

One of the ongoing pursuits is exploration of the narrative potential of space and architecture – by reversing chronologies and orders, changing proportions, simulating spatial collisions or seamless intersections between the real or found, and the fictional. Many of the past project were based on making believable, cardboard reconstructions of places and spaces from various cinematic sources and devoiding them of the original context and story line, but he has also done the opposite – creating sets or designing posters for the films

that don’t exist.

Besides working in 3-D and large scale, he has recently experimented with making interventions “inside“ the actual films, by for example removing all characters from the movie and letting the narrative be told by the empty exteriors and interiors, lamps, furniture and other forms of material culture and inanimate matter. Read more about him here.

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