Kill your idols: in Milan the exhibition of Radek Szlaga, a leading name in Polish art

From September 27 to October 7, 2022, the Basilica of San Celso in Milan opens to the public the exhibition Kill Your Idols, the first solo show in Milan by Radek Szlaga (Gliwice, 1979), among the leading voices of the contemporary Polish art scene. The exhibition is promoted by PostmastersROMA gallery under the patronage of the Polish Institute of Rome and the collaboration of the association LAQ - lartquotidien, and is accompanied by a critical text by Giovanna Manzotti.

Trained between Poland and the United States, Radek Szlaga is a multidisciplinary artist who expresses himself through painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, acting as a mediator of a particular dialogue between traditional artistic languages and more contemporary perspectives. His works, characterized by a dense layering of colors, materials, drawings and iconography, are the manifestation of an imaginary that is as personal as it is collective, built up over the years by assimilating iconic and evocative elements drawn from popular culture, history, politics and mass media. For the exhibition Kill Your Idols, conceived specifically for the spaces of the Basilica of San Celso, Szlaga presents Noriega Mix Tapes, a never-before-seen series of works - 13 paintings and one sculpture - inspired by a historical fact bordering on the absurd, of which he gathers the most anecdotal and humorous aspects by filtering them through his own stylistic signature.

In 1989, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega escaped the American invasion by taking refuge in the Vatican Embassy in Panama. To capture him, the U.S. armed forces command chose to adopt an unconventional method: it deployed a dozen amplifiers outside the embassy to flush out the dictator, who was a big opera fan, to the sound of hard rock and heavy metal music. Songs such as Enter Sandman by Metallica, Welcome to the Jungle by Guns N’ Roses, or Paranoid by Black Sabbath resonated for days until Noriega, exhausted, and further exhausted by a demonstration demanding his surrender, surrendered to U.S. forces.

Once again Szlaga relates to the major themes of the contemporary world with lucidity and disillusionment: central to his reflection are concepts such as globalization, information and post-truths, and the balance of power between East and West, returned to the audience in all their complexity even from the point of view of creating the work. Indeed, the artist selects, archives and reworks elements of Eastern European and American imagery, blending high culture and popular iconography alongside suggestions from his own subconscious.

Eclectic and layered, the works in the exhibition return this complexity through fragmented images, somewhere between figuration and abstraction, inviting one to dwell on their jagged surface, formed by different layers of colors and materials - physical and at the same time ideological textures - born from fragments of previous works, embedded in a rigorous and articulate artistic research focused on the present.

Central to Radek Szlaga’s artistic production is the autobiographical element. Born during the fall of the communist regime in Poland, the artist moved with his family to the United States in the 1990s. Szlaga’s diasporic existence results divided between admiration of the “first world” and Eastern European reality, and culminates in Kill Your Idols as a realization of the disconnect between the illusory image of the American global superpower and the current state of that hegemony: crumbled and scattered in the past. A metaphor for this reflection is a sculpture portraying Axl Rose, Guns N’ Roses ’ historic leader now in his sixties and disempowered, who embodies the current erosion of those ideals, dogmas and certainties on which the greatest universal myths were built in the past.

Radek Szlaga (1979, Gliwice, Poland) lives and works in Brussels and Detroit. A graduate of the PoznaÅ„ University of the Arts, Szlaga uses different media such as painting, drawing, sculpture and installation adopting a bold approach toward the visual culture of Eastern Europe and America, making extensive use of the imagery of his own subconscious. Central to Szlaga’s work is the exploration of identity and the boundary between reality and simulation. His practice is based on both historical research and an introspective exploration of his own memories and dreams. Szlaga describes his pictorial approach as ’a way of thinking’ that involves a constant rethinking and ’peeling back’ of layers of tradition and history through selective recycling of archived and found images, which often, literally, ’cut and paste’ transferring fragments from one canvas to another.

Szlaga has presented his works at: KUMU (Tallinn), NEST (Den Haag), ZachÄ™ta - National Gallery of Art (Warsaw), Museum Jerke, (Recklinghausen), CCA Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw), Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart), National Museum in PoznaÅ„, Foksal Gallery (Warsaw), Galerist (Istanbul), Postmasters Gallery (NYC), Pioneer Works (NYC) National Art Museum of China (Beijing), Trinosophes (Detroit), Performa 13 (NYC), Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius) ), National Museum in Szczecin, Jerke Museum (Recklinghausen). His works can be found in the following collections: Société Générale Collection Paris, Art Collection of the European Central Bank Frankfurt am Main, Collection of the ING Polish Art Foundation Warsaw, CCA Ujazdowski Castle Warsaw, Jerke Museum Recklinghausen, Osman Djajadisastra Collection Germany, National Museum Poznan, National Museum Gdansk Museum.

Pictured, three paintings from the Noriega Mix Tapes series (2022; oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm)

Kill your idols: in Milan the exhibition of Radek Szlaga, a leading name in Polish art

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