In his photographic works, collages, sculptures, and installations, Polish artist Piotr Uklański uses stereotypical motifs and strategies from pop culture, art, and cinema to address issues of cultural identity and authenticity.

Uklański has a reputation for a certain insolence with regard to the way he plays with audience expectations, the way he not only uses strategies of selfpromotion and marketing but also draws on them for fundamental aspects of his conceptual work, and the way he coopts references. He starts with pictures that are already bankrupt, hackneyed, and hollow and proceeds to totally destroy them. He recycles visuals, concepts, and clichés—landscapes, sunsets, Hollywood, great artists, collectors, curators—and gives them a new presence, both crass and seductive, precisely by questioning the politics of different visual worlds. But it would be wrong to describe his approach as either critical or affirmative. These categories will not stick to his perfect surfaces, just as they won’t stick to the works of Jeff Koons.

Uklański presents himself as a star, as a bad boy of the art world. His film Summer Love (2006), a tragicomic Western whose most prominent actor, Val Kilmer in the role of a corpse, is not given a single line, was launched, naturally, as the “first” Polish Western. His girlfriend Alison Gingeras, whose bare buttocks he published as a double page ad in Artforum as Untitled (Ginger Ass) (2003), is curator to the collector François Pinault. The xray image of a skull in swirling psychedelic colors does not show just any old skull, but that of this major collector. Elizabeth Peyton, known for her portraits of celebrities, has also drawn Piotr Uklański. He is interested in role play and fame because the resulting attention is a screen against which to deliberately place his artist image.

He is concerned, however, not with developing his own myth but with analyzing its mechanisms. Within the theater of his work, he likes to take on multiple roles, wanting to be “a modern­ist, a post-minimalist, a Popconceptualist, a photographer, a dilettante, a painter’s muse, a political artist like Boltanski and a filmmaker like Polanski.” (Flash Art, #236, May 2004)

At the Secession, he is showing older and new sitespecific works, subjecting his own output to a renewed examination that paints a selfportrait of the artist as a montage, as a nonauthentic artificial construct. In a recent interview he said: “If we presume that art or other creative activity is capable of reflecting the truth about human existence, […] it should not mimic that existence but create an artificial reality/form.” (Spike, #11, 2007) Finally, is he perhaps a Romantic after all?