Jerzy KOSAŁKA (1955), Mother, father, brother-in-law, daughter and two sons from the series: Polish bile; 2021

Wooden shelf, glass bottles filled with paint, fabric; 55 x 27.5 x 14 cm
Signed on shelf: Kosalka '21 on each bottle from the bottom: Kosalka 2021
The work in the version consisting of 21 bottles was purchased by the CCA in Torun

Painter, creator of installations, films, objects, performer. In the 1970s he became involved with the underground esoteric art group Oneiron, active in Upper Silesia. It significantly influenced his early work and the horizon of his interests later. While working as an assistant at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, he joined the then-forming Luxus group, with which he jointly edited and published the art zine "Luxus," today counted among the most important phenomena on the Polish art scene of the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1990s Kosalka finally abandoned painting and began creating installations and objects. His characteristic ironic sense of humor and pataphysical fascination borrowed from Alferd Jarry and Duchamp had a significant impact on the group's appearances in the 1990s.In 1995. Held the artist's first solo exhibition titled. "Modestly without luxury", in 1997 there was a TV documentary devoted to him, titled after one of the artist's most important works "Kosalce - Nation". Since the 1990s, in successive series of works, the artist has taken up issues related to identity and manipulation in the era of transformational hyperconsumption. He captures advertising slogans, creating the "CosalCa" series imitating the marketing strategies of the "Coca Cola" brand and tobacco concerns, creating billboards with the slogan "I smoke because I drink." In 2004, an artist's retrospective was held at BWA Wroclaw, titled. "The art of disappearing art, the art of looking for art". In his later works Kosalka deals intensively with the tension between history as a construction and the individual fate of individuals, propaganda and resentment. He portrays these emotions by constructing comic scenes and mock-ups in which collective repression and trauma are revived.
The first version of the work was titled "Polnische Galle" and was created in 2006 on the occasion of the Polish edition of the international festival of art in public space "Urban Potential" in Dresden. The title Polish bile exploited the ambiguity of the term, which, in relation to the painting's subject matter, can mean a typically Polish shade of yellow, and at the same time clearly refers to the secretion of the gallbladder [chole - bile], characteristic of the most impulsive of the four temperaments distinguished in ancient medicine.
The Polish version of the work appeared in 2009 during the Art Moves Billboard Art Festival in Toruń and has been exhibited several times from 2009 to 2019, including: at GSN in Gorzow, CCA in Torun (where the work has become synonymous with the short circuit between artists and curator), Propaganda gallery in Warsaw, BWA Jelenia Gora and CRP Orońsko.
Critic Iza Kowalczyk notes regarding this version of the work: The work refers to Polish political reality, to the venom poured out on each other by political opponents, to the focus in all public life on failures, tragedies, conflicts, and therefore on everything negative, resulting in, symbolic bile.
The object is a typical example in Kosalka's work of the use of ready-made materials and objects [ready-made]. The work is discussed in a comprehensive monograph: "Whoever Wants to Believe Kosalka Jerzy".