Oskar Dawicki – MOUTH TO MOUTH

Oskar Dawicki – MOUTH TO MOUTH

Oskar Dawicki MOUTH TO MOUTH 📅
opening on Saturday, February 14, 2026, from 5:00 to 8:00 PM. 🗓️
the exhibition will be on view until April 3.

• lokal_30
• Monopol
• TBA

Taking air into one’s mouth can happen in different situations: to inflate a balloon, or to stop oneself from saying too much, but also when performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. All of these cases appear in Oskar Dawicki’s latest exhibition. Its primary material is air—its absence, and even its excess. Dawicki’s newest works inevitably revolve around the questions of genius and vanity as two sides of the same coin: the artist’s fate. If genius guarantees immortality, vanity can be deadly for art.

Dawicki’s performative background leads him to approach these sensitive issues through the lens of experimental physics. How can one breathe eternal life into an artist’s fading body? By forcing air into the mouth, or by warming the hands?

Dawicki attempts both. He measures the weight of fame and the many faces of artistic poverty. He displays a brass cast of 'Chopin’s Left Hand', and in the secret 'Poet’s Room' he pays a writer an absurdly high fee for a poem written just for him. In 'The Poetry of Selection' he paints the tragedy of artistic hierarchies that arise not from love of art, but from relentless arithmetic. Poetry—a field that brings great symbolic prestige but little money—serves here as a metaphor for the art Dawicki would like to save. To save art, or at least to save artists—and above all one artist, the one within his own body.

The exhibition 'Mouth to Mouth' is also a collection of spectacular props that introduce a fresh dose of sincere despair into Dawicki’s life performance.