RealArtist.com, 2019

Piotr Bzdęga’s work is an instructional video kept in the convention of the so-called online tutorial, in which the artist plays the role of a presenter explaining how to paint a high-quality abstract painting using simple and repetitive formal procedures. The recording is a pastiche of popular YouTube, Instagram or TikTok videos which show easy and fun ways to create paintings with minimum effort. Using the characteristic editing and background music, these short films spread an untrue image of an artist’s work, depreciate it and even make it look primitive. The seemingly humorous work by Piotr Bzdęga highlights the important problem of distorting the image of contemporary art (culture), which continues to be one of the most demanding disciplines in terms of understanding and interpreting the phenomena spread between the extreme poles of authenticity and falsehood.

photo: Małgorzata Kujda