Jakub Julian Ziolkowski: Ian Moon

Ziolkowski conjures an imaginary universe in which phantasmagoric imagery appears across diverse media including ceramics, sculptural reliefs and works on canvas. Individually compelling, when seen together, his works create a transgressive mindscape, bristling with narrative and detail. The current series of works, presented for the first time, has been made following a recent phase of intense creative experimentation during an eight-month period while the artist was living in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Throughout the exhibition, Ziolkowski uses hallucinatory imagery drawn from his own acute emotional experiences. Ziolkowski describes having undergone a personal and creative transformation in recent times and the exhibition reflects his highly individualistic approach to this subject matter. His is a world in which recurrent themes – of flames, entrails and skulls – combine in a cacophony of forms, the source of which is the artist’s own imagination. Viewers are invited to enter an emotional realm in which obsessions and desires, fears and doubts, and passions and anxieties all collide.

This exhibition is centred around several intertwined themes and narratives including both the redemptive and the destructive power of human relationships, and the potential of spiritual rebirth grounded in primal experiences.