On a stage shrouded in darkness, the boards creak underfoot. A sound similar to that made by old floorboards in the stuffy Kraków apartments of nineteenth-century tenement houses.
Slowly warming spotlights gradually draw a procession of figures out of the shadows.
Bones and jewels.
The audience’s excitement resembles that likely felt by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, fired by the prospect of looting treasures from Tutankhamun’s tomb. In the name of science.
However, the lord was not destined to remain long in ecstatic rapture. Shortly afterwards he died under mysterious circumstances, and the event became excellent fodder for the press writing about ancient curses, corpses and other oddities.
Amazing tales, erudite yarns in which truth intertwines with fiction, form the fabric of the narratives Okoński constructs in his sculptural installations.
Objects – islands among meandering lines of salt drawings. Inhabited by handsome youths. Or what remains of them.
Secret rituals, myths and symbols, Eros and Thanatos.
Corpses in the closet.
Mateusz Okoński
Sculptor, collector, curator, director, performer, exhibition designer, jewelry maker, cultural animator, activist, storyteller, connoisseur, personality, eccentric, phenomenon. It is extremely difficult to confine Okoński to simple categories, and his unusual creative path is an intriguing story deeply immersed in his fascination with the history of art and culture.
Born in Kraków in 1985. Here he completed his studies at the Sculpture Department of the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts. Kraków, with its powdery façade of urban-intelligence rituals, noble lineages and church hierarchies and its underground tissue of damp cellars that once housed smoky pubs, artists’ studios and gay clubs, constitutes one of the foundations of the artist’s sensibility.
Okoński’s flat is a cabinet of curiosities. Not in a figurative sense. At the dazzled guest of the artist’s receptions, figures gaze from hanging tapestries and old portraits framed in heavy gilded frames. From every corner of the space emerge curiosities: taxidermied crocodile bodies, skulls, ritual sculptures, exquisite ornaments and artful votives. The impressive collection is not static; it undergoes continuous transformations that make the structure curated by Mateusz Okoński resemble a metamorphosing, pulsating organism full of life energy rather than the cold space of museum architecture.
"That pig, Okoński!" — so titled his text on the sculptural installation “Purification” Wojciech Szymański, critic and independent curator, co-author of the curatorial concept of the Polish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Art Biennale. Placing a marble pig on a concrete plinth protruding above the surface of the Vistula, lying on a pile and referring to a burnt-offering ritual, was one of the most important Kraków art events of 2010.
The noble material, a theme drawn from mystical rituality, and a refined play with corporeality would become important motifs in the artist’s later work.
In subsequent years Okoński created numerous sculptures, objects and installations, focusing both on themes taken from his collector’s searches and on threads related to identity, corporeality and rituality. Together with Jakub Skoczek and Jakub Woynarowski he founded the art group “Quadratum Nigrum”, which explored the connections between modernism, mysticism and the rituality of secret societies.
An important aspect of the artist’s work are also the experimental performances he directed, inspired by the aesthetic of the Bauhaus triadic ballet and the interwar Cricot Artists’ Theater. The geometric aesthetics of modernism formed the structure of the artist’s refined, minimalist solo exhibition “Thot” at Gallery Aristoi in 2016.
A significant work by Mateusz Okoński is the monumental sculptural installation “Pasiak” presented at the exhibition “50 Years After 50 Years of the Bauhaus” at Kunstverein Stuttgart. There the artist juxtaposed the concept of Johannes Itten’s “Tower of Fire” associated with the Bauhaus with the folk aesthetics of the striped garments produced by the Central Workshop of Folk and Artistic Industry, constructing an ambiguous narrative emphasizing themes of colonialism and systems of oppression.
In later projects the artist focused on subtle tensions of forms derived from the male body, juxtaposed with attributes of power, violence and labor, creating compositions that reveal the physical dimension of working with sculptural material.
Beyond his own creative activity, Okoński co-created and organized numerous cultural initiatives, including: the “Zbiornik Kultury” project of the Małopolska Institute of Culture, the “Hejnał Expedition Art Festival” in Minsk and the Ecuadorian jungle, the “Microart 1:10” project, the “Salt” project addressing the disappearing urban craft traditions in the context of gentrification processes, efforts to preserve Kraków’s modernist heritage and many others. He is also the author of arrangements for dozens of exhibitions in prestigious centers at home and abroad.
Kuba Skoczek
Curator: Kuba Skoczek
Exhibition poster: Mateusz Okoński
Photos: Szymon Sokołowski
Exhibition duration: 20/02/2026 - 6/04/2026
