Jacek Kołodziejski - Freckle/s

The first individual photo book by Jacek Kołodziejski sums up the process of formal exploration that started ten years ago: “Ten years ago, I placed an order with the Division of Control and Robotics in Poznan - to cut a perfect square in a metal plate. I placed the square on the photographic paper and exposed it. I repeated that process one thousand times, exposing paper after paper. Each image served as a negative to the next. As a result of that experiment, I discovered the potential of the perfect figure and its organic shape”,says Kołodziejski. This conceptual experiment initiated a formal exploration on the level of various media - painting, installation, sculpture – and became a leitmotif that comes back in artist’s various projects: represented by a figure-stain, figure-mole, figure-stigmat, or figure-freckle. It finally becomes an ironic commentary or a self-portrait of the artist. Everything is important: the design, scenography, clothes, colors, composition, decomposition, post-production. Red hair and freckles as obsessively recurring motifs are embedded in characteristic, idiosyncratic visual language that Kołodziejski had developed over the years.

The book is designed by Magdalena Heliasz and was published in connection to the PDN Photo Annual award received by Kołodziejski in 2016. Except the PDN Photo Annual, Kołodziejski has also been awarded in another contest organized by the same magazine: "The Look - where fashion meets art". In both cases the awarded project was a campaign created for the Polish jewelry brand TAKK and their collection “Aphelium” – the farthest from the Sun.  

More information:

www.jacekkolodziejski.com

About the artist:

Jacek Kolodziejski (born 1980) is an award-winning visual artist, who works predominantly as a photographer, but in his artistic practice explores also other media: sculpture, design, painting, and video. In his work, he concentrates on the concepts of the extraordinary, of otherness, and (hybrid) identity through various forms of artistic expression: from conceptual photography till self-made art objects. His interdisciplinary approach makes his art transcend the limits of the photographic medium, that becomes rather a tool to register the ultimate effect of the creative process behind the image.

His works were exhibited in the main art institutions and at festivals in Poland and internationally, including the Center of Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Raster Gallery, the International Photo Festival in Arle. In 2016, he was one of the winners of the PDN Photo Annual award, and PDN The Look – Where Fashion Meets Art, as well as was awarded with the 1 st place in the International Photographer of the Year contest. The book “Freckle/s”, published in 2016, received one of the most important awards in the Polish photography industry, KTR Golden Award, and was shortlisted in the contest Photobook of the Year organized in connection to the Fotofestiwal in Lodz, Poland.

Jacek Kołodziejski, Freckle/s
Creative concept: Jacek Kołodziejski

Text: Wiktoria Michałkiewicz

Graphic design: Magdalena Heliasz
Language: English
Number of pages: 64, Number of photographs: 32
Cover: Hard cover
Dimenions : 21,5 cm x 27,5 cm
Year: 2016