Piotr Uklański

Piotr Uklanski (born 1968) is a contemporary Polish-American artist who works in a variety of media. His themes range from larger issues of media and representation, to playful depictions of the body. His art is characterized by an astonishing array of media.

Piotr Uklanski is from Warsaw, Poland where he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. He later came to New York where he studied photography at Cooper Union. He first emerged on the art scene in New York in mid-1990s. When he first arrived in New York he explains, "I studied painting, but in the evenings I was doing performances. The performances, at the time, I was interested in for photographs. It was sort of like I was creating an image in the performance, and that in some way led me to my interest in photography. And interestingly, I would dog sit, I had to make money. [laughs] I lived in New York, I didn't have any support, I was the classic "got off the plane to go to school." So I worked in the studios, and I think the two collided. With people, like Guy Bourdin—at the time I did not know who Guy Bourdin was—you realize that you can work in the commercial world of photography and still make art. That's what I was aiming at. That's not exactly how I ended up supporting myself as an artist, but that was the interest that I took when it came to photography."

"Uklański's willingness to take on potentially controversial subjects draws polemical reactions."

http://www.gagosian.com/artists/piotr-uklanski

"In addition to the survey of his own work, Uklański scoured the Met's archives to curate his own show, "Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Selects from the Met Collection," that explores the themes of Eros (life force) and Thanatos (death drive) in a neighboring gallery."

"It used to be easy because I would just have an idea and was able to drop everything and go after this idea. So, let's say I was doing photographs and then I moved to film, or from film to painting, from painting to fiber art—it gets increasingly hard, because you never really abandon the previous body. While I stopped intensely working on photographs, I always did photographs over the years. At some point, you end up dragging nine bodies of work and, you know, there's only 24 hours in a day. [laughs] So it's a lot harder, but it's fun. I don't think that an artist that works with multiple bodies is more interesting than one that works with one, but it does help make it more interesting." (quote from ulkanski)

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/piotr-uklanski-metropolitan-museum-of-art/

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