Presenting rich, often unpublished archival material – sketches, photographs, records of actions and performances, Artist Archive creates a multi-layered image of Kozłowski’s artistic practice spanning over six decades, while also portraying an artist who made a creative tool out of reflection on language, reality, and time.
Artist Archive is a new series of exhibitions launched by the Profile Foundation dedicated to exploring the lesser-known areas of contemporary artistic practice. Jarosław Kozłowski is the first of the exhibited artists, as one of the most important figures of Polish conceptual art; an artist, educator, and the initiator of the international artistic network NET. Connected with Poznań, where he was the provost of the PWSSP (currently known as the University of Fine Arts) in the 1980s and strived to make it more open to the avant-garde phenomena of the contemporary world. Making this conceptual artist the perfect first step in the exploration undertaken by Profile.
The artist could be seen as one of the Polish precursors to treat art as a field of research on meaning and communication. His Modal Drawings or Exercises in Semiotics were experiments with language, logic, and the notion of truth in art. Kozłowski claimed that “art does not have to prove anything – it can play with reality and language”.
The net that connected the world
But first, Kozłowski began his career in the second half of the 1960s when the Polish art scene started to open itself to conceptualist ideas. In 1967, he collaborated with Andrzej Matuszewski at the Od Nowa Gallery, where they led the Debut Salon. It was one of the first independent galleries operating in the post–World War II Poland, exhibiting works of artists separate from the contemporary official art movement. Even the very first works of Kozłowski were often provocative and met with disapproval from academic authorities, but also foreshadowed his signature attitude full of irony, intellectual distance, and critique of art institutions.
In the early 1970s, Kozłowski, together with Andrzej Kostołowski, initiated the international artistic network NET – a correspondence project that aimed to transcend the political and geographical borders of the Polish People’s Republic. Over 300 invitations were sent to artists in Poland and abroad, featuring a short manifesto on the freedom of exchange of ideas and an encouragement to collaborate and share artistic facts, such as concepts, projects, and notes. The idea of free circulation, dialogue, and decentralisation was an alternative to the political and ideological isolation of Polish culture at the time.
Kozłowski claimed that “art does not have to prove anything – it can play with reality and language”.
The first exhibition took place at Kozłowski’s apartment in Poznań, with the authorities reacting quickly as the meeting was interrupted by the Security Service. The artist lost his assistant position at the university and became a librarian while continuing his activity. So only a year later, he founded the legendary Akumulatory 2 Gallery at the Jowita student dormitory. It was there that works by Polish and foreign artists associated with the Fluxus movement, conceptualism, and mail art were exhibited, and having been operating until 1989, it became one of the most important avant-garde centres in Central Europe.
When it comes to Kozłowski’s art, as early as 1967, in Arrangement (Aranżacja), presented at the Od Nowa Gallery, everyday objects, such as a bandaged vacuum cleaner placed in one of the rooms, played a crucial role. It was during this time that Kozłowski started working at the university and began to criticise the contemporary artistic practices and shift away from painting. Since the 1990s, Kozłowski’s work has focused, however, on the idea of the third circle – a space between myth and reality of art. He started to create installations made from everyday objects that had been removed from their “real reality” and stripped of their context. Among the drawings, there are numerous sketches for works from the Soft Protection series, in which the artist juxtaposed and “bandaged” furniture cut in half, creating arrangements resembling a room after a disaster. This ironic gesture of bandaging objects gives them an almost human dignity. In Kozłowski’s projects Bedroom. Nomadic Version and Living Room. Nomadic Version, furniture is stacked and equipped with wheels, as if it were ready to flee. Impermanence, movement, and destabilisation become a metaphor for the condition of a contemporary human.
A similar social commentary appears in the work Borrowed object/temporary object, where the composition is to be constructed from equipment borrowed from private homes, which, for the duration of the exhibition, gains the status of works of art – only to later return to everyday use. The artist sometimes creates his statements using ready-made objects that are not only taken out of their functional context but also stripped of the interpretations imposed on them by art, as can be seen in the sketches from the Gravity Room and Negative Room series, where objects stand on walls or ceilings, arranged as if in a room, as if ready for use, but it is impossible to use them.
Time as material
Besides objects borrowed from our everyday reality, time is another subject vital to Kozłowski. Like in the Continuum series, which has been carried out since 1988 in various cities around the world. Kozłowski, equipped with a blackboard, chalk, and an alarm clock, repeated the same scenario: he would cover the blackboard with chalk, wipe it clean, wait for the surface to dry, and finally smash the alarm clock. This performance changed as the years went by and became a record of a personal experience of transience. In 2023, the final, fortieth performance in this series took place at the Profile Foundation. The use of the alarm clock also appears in other projects, such as Time Declensions and Times Archive, which utilise a collection of watches gathered by Kozłowski from friends and artists as part of the NET initiative.
Reflections on time and transience, this time in relation to information, are also expressed in the works from the Recycled News series, in which the artist paints over newspaper pages with watercolours, removing their content and dates. “What is removed from the order of transience, gains new relevance”, said Kozłowski.
In his later works, the artist also refers to the social and political reality more and more often. The series European Standards and United World are ironic commentaries on the idea of global unity, from its totalitarian to utopian versions. The exhibition Counting-Out Rhyme at the AT Gallery in Poznań refers to places of tragic events and terrorist attacks, contrasting a children’s rhyme with the tragedy of the contemporary world. As such, his works from this period combine a coldness of analysis with emotional tension, remaining faithful to the principle that art should provoke thought rather than illustrate reality.
“What is removed from the order of transience, gains new relevance”, said Kozłowski.
Between memory and the present
The exhibition at the Profile is not a retrospective, but an attempt to interpret the artist through his archives. It includes sketches, notes, letters, documentation of actions and installations from his entire artistic career, showing the evolution of Kozłowski’s language from conceptual drawing to complex multimedia installations. It is also a testament to his role as an educator, curator, and animator – a man who helped create independent art institutions, while constantly questioning their purpose.
Artist Archive is a living reflection on the history of art. In the case of Jarosław Kozłowski, an artist who has spent his entire life analysing the boundaries of art and its language, the archive becomes an integral part of his work. The drawings are an essential part of the exhibition, allowing us to delve deeper into the creative process and ask ourselves whether it is only the final work that matters, or is the process of achieving the final effect is also important. The exhibition focuses then on the process, which is all the more significant in the case of an artist associated with conceptualism. It is about art as a process of thinking, about objects that become signs, and about time that can be stopped, even if only for a moment, in the act of drawing or action.
Artist Archive: Jarosław Kozłowski
November 22 – December 23, 2025
Profile Foundation, Warsaw
