Artist Feature: Marcin Owczarek
"A world full of mysterious stories and cryptic messages..."
Marcin Owczarek creates a dark, macabre world full of mysterious stories and cryptic messages, a place parallel to our existence in the here and now, reminding us of our human virtues and imperfections.
Each piece begins with a journey. He travels to new places, photo-documenting the details, exploring the culture, talking to the people, and noting their history. Using his collection of photographs and knowledge, he then begins to digitally piece together his work, creating new points on an imaginary map, a world he calls “Dystopy Land.”
Though his tone and subject matter are imbued with darkness, Owczarek doesn’t intend his work to be negative or sinister, just a reflection of the world as it presents itself to him. He plays with metaphor and symbol, giving meaning to each and every detail, articulating his true thoughts and his perception of the human condition.
“I simply give you the vision of naked life without masks, true life that we are afraid to see and accept. When we look at this world from underneath the mask, without ‘lipstick,’ we notice some kind of apocalyptic condition. We can pretend we live in a perfect world, but the truth is that we live in a dystopian universe.”
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Marcin Owczarek was born in 1985 in Wroclaw. At the age of twenty, he began studying photography at The College of Photography in Wroclaw, graduating with an honorable mention for his cycle Brave New World, which presented an idiosyncratic version of a future world. Owczarek is fascinated with the influence of new technologies over human life, particularly within urban space. Focusing on the issues of mechanization and standardization, he tackles them in an anti-utopian style, depicting the total capture of the spirit by the machine world. Owczarek’s art has also been influenced by the content of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, as well as his studies in cultural anthropology. He lives and works in Belgium.