Nora Arrhenius Hagdahl speaks with Tomasz Kręcicki about his huge, cinematic paintings which augment and unveil an often-funny, always-flawed material everyday.
I meet up with Tomasz Kręcicki outside his studio, located in the very heart of Kraków, facing the park that surrounds the town’s postcard-ready Old Town. As we walk through the courtyard and enter the charmingly run-down, turn-of-the-century building — a faded grandeur in that typical Eastern European fashion — he mentions that it’s his last month here; the house is getting renovated, and all artists have to move out. He acquired the space at the onset of the pandemic in 2020: “I found this place by accident, and I like it because it’s big, cheap, and spacious — 70 square meters for 300 euros — and it’s quite typical for Kraków artists to have their studios in the Old Town. However, there is no heating.” Before, he shared a studio with his colleagues and collaborators, Karolina Jabłońska and Cyryl Polaczek. Together, they operate under the name Potencja, both as a collective and a project space in Kraków, where they organise exhibitions with their own work and that of other artists.
We sit around a radiator in the middle of the room, surrounded by paintings leaning against every inch of wall space, stacked one over the other. Tomasz is finishing up a large suite of paintings for his upcoming exhibition, Move, at Esther Schipper in Berlin, opening in early March. It’s his second solo show and third exhibition with the gallery, following his 2023 debut with Potencja in the show Reconciling Apparent Contradictions. Many of the paintings are huge, at least 2-by-2 meters, portraying close-ups of furniture, a key, and withered plants. I’m curious about how he will get them out of here, through the narrow hallway and the winding staircase.
Nora Arrhenius Hagdahl: You graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 2015, spending an exchange year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg, Germany. Could you share a bit about your life before art school?
Tomasz Kręcicki: I grew up in Kielce, a mid-sized city located between Kraków and Warsaw. It’s a rather boring place — the kind you want to leave right after high school. In Poland, you basically have to decide what you want to do with your life by the age of seventeen, which was quite difficult for me. I had many ideas. I wasn’t raised in an artistic environment — my family had no connection to the art world — but I always knew that I liked to draw. I thought I might end up as a graphic designer, where there was a chance of earning some money, and therefore decided to study art history. After attending preparatory art school, I realized how relaxed I felt when I was absorbed in making art. After my second attempt at applying to art school, I got in. My primary goal was always to leave my hometown. I moved to Kraków, and I think I want to stay here forever.
NAH: What does the art scene look like here?
TK: It’s quite local, but there are a lot of artists here, some with international careers. Fewer than in Warsaw, of course — and strangely, we don’t have any commercial galleries. Instead, we have many artist-run spaces. It’s more self-organized.
NAH: Like with you and Potencja?
TK: Yes, exactly. We used to share a studio like this, with an apartment layout, where we also ran the gallery together.
NAH: You’ve collaborated since 2012 and have done several shows together. How do your works relate to each other?
TK: We’ve had a strong influence on one another, yet each of us are still different. We’re all painters, but I’d say Karolina is the most colourful and expressive among us, while Cyryl is the most traditional. We all share a sense of humour. When we shared a studio, we would critique each other’s work, but nowadays we don’t exchange feedback as frequently.
Tomasz tells me he’s always been interested in painting the things around him. His last show was concerned with insomnia, stemming from the artist’s own troubled sleeping. For his upcoming show at Esther Schipper, he’s fittingly worked with the theme of moving, anticipating the imminent studio relocation that will coincide with the show’s opening. Tomasz doesn’t paint grand scenes; instead, his work comprises depictions of hyper-magnified details pared down to their essential forms, almost like frames from a comic book. There’s something both anxious and humorous about enlarging these seemingly trivial, often flawed objects, like a single broken cable painted on a grey background — perhaps inspired by the ongoing renovation of the studio’s staircase, where wires sprawl out from the walls to end up in nothing — or a close-up of a piece of green furniture that fills the entire picture plane, with one of the upholstery buttons hanging by a thread. It’s like the artist unveils his meticulous, monomaniacal gaze on the world.
NAH: Why are you so concerned with depicting the mundane?
TK: I enjoy observing the world around me. I once worried that my source of inspiration might eventually run dry, but the world is full of stuff, constantly. I like the challenge of finding something interesting in the simplest of motifs. I also find it intriguing how objects shift meaning over time, and that the denotation of symbols depends on the world around them.
NAH: How has your style developed between art school and the present?
TK: I’ve always been obsessed with observing and drawing really simple things. I keep coming back to these basic objects again and again; I painted keys and cables even before art school, but back then I worked in way smaller formats than I do now. Somebody told me that you shouldn’t think too much about what to paint and that you shouldn’t take the work too seriously.
NAH: How important is humour to your work?
TK: I’m stuck on thinking about art as a thing that needs a sense of humour, maybe. I think it’s a way to keep some distance from reality — not only in art but in life. I don’t know if these paintings are very funny, though… I don’t really like art that’s explicitly funny.
NAH: Tell me a bit about your thoughts behind the upcoming exhibition with Esther Schipper.
TK: It’s about moving out. I started with five paintings, some of them being these, depicting hands carrying things. I was really drawn to the motif of withered plants; it reminded me of abandoned homes. I also liked its connection to art history — so many artists before me have worked with paintings of plants. I looked at the work of Lucian Freud a lot, for example. I also painted the Sansevieria plant. It’s a typical moving-in gift because it demands so little care, and I think it’s really beautiful.
NAH: It’s a plant you can put anywhere, it doesn’t need sunlight or demand anything from you. It says “Dom” on the key — what does that mean?
TK: It means home in Polish. I didn’t really know what to write there, so I thought the simplest thing might be the best. When I come to Berlin, I might wipe it out and write something different.
NAH: How do you think about titles?
TK: With these works, I’m still figuring things out. Most of the time, the title simply describes what the painting depicts, because I don’t want to force a specific interpretation on the audience. But maybe that’s part of the fun.
Tomasz’s work isn’t restricted to painting, and sometimes the artist works with props and spatial installations in the exhibition halls — like with his last show at Piana Gallery in Kraków, where the paintings weren’t placed on the walls, but hung from the rim of a gigantic teacup placed in the middle of the room. He often plays with scale, with tiny details either blown out of proportion or rendered at the exact same size as the original object — an enlargement which reflects the artist’s distinct perspective and establishes subjective hierarchies in the exhibition space.
Tomasz pulls out a small model of the Esther Schipper gallery space from one of the backrooms of the studio, where he’s started installing the show in miniature format. There, you can see a life-sized painting of a door hung so that it touches the floor, making it appear like a real doorway one could walk through — except for its absurdly oversized handle. Through the arrangement of the works in the room, each painting becomes a theatrical prop that contributes to a larger scenography, crafting an immersive narrative that pulls the viewer into a staged experience.
NAH: Scale is an important part of how you work with your motifs. Can you tell me more about that?
TK: I like how changing the size of the canvas can radically alter the meaning of an image. If this painting of a plant were three meters tall, it would become very different, it would be a tree. I always start small though. Most of the time, I begin with the motif at a 1:1 scale. I keep small sketches of all my paintings.
He pulls out tiny canvases from a drawer and makes me guess what they are. They’re so small they look like blocks when stretched on the frame. It’s a key and an effervescent tablet, but I have a hard time translating the graphic shapes to objects. One painting depicts a fabric roller that perfectly fills the frame — it’s as if the three-dimensional object has been completely flattened.
TK: I like this play with the painting medium.
NAH: You’ve developed a particular style in your paintings, where you zero in on specific aspects of your surroundings and abstract them from the background to create these almost graphic images. Can you tell me a bit about how that style developed?
TK: I like to focus on the motifs that interest me, so the background is usually just one colour. It came naturally to me. I always wanted to paint something more complex and expressive where there’s a lot going on in one canvas, but it never really worked out. Maybe it’s like that for every artist — you just have something that works for you and comes naturally. I recently saw an exhibition by Mike Kelley, and I’m always impressed by artists who can jump from one medium to another. Maybe because it’s so different from my own practice — my approach is very organized and strict.
There is a clear connection between Tomasz’s work and American Pop Art, particularly in his graphic approach to painting. His focus on everyday objects and their exaggerated scale brings to mind Claes Oldenburg’s sculptures, which transform ordinary items by enlarging them and shifting their meaning. On the table in his studio, there is a large stack of printed photographs of everyday objects, posters, and artworks. Many of these motifs appear in the paintings around us.
NAH: Do you always paint from images?
TK: Sometimes. It’s a mix of sketches, images, and memories. These are all advertisements from my hometown. [He points to some of the images in the pile] This is how commercials looked in the 90s in Poland, they’re all made at this very special moment in our history when the country was transitioning from communism to a new reality.
NAH: Can you talk about how the Polish art tradition has influenced your work?
TK: I’ve been heavily influenced by the Polish School of Posters from the 1960s to the ‘80s. The movement relied on simple graphic tools to create a distinct and recognizable style. When I was growing up in Poland, these posters were everywhere — on movie posters, book covers, and even in homes that weren’t necessarily into art. My grandmother had a lot of books with covers designed by these artists. They were a constant presence in Polish homes, and I think that was my first real contact with art, even before I knew it was art.
There are a lot of similarities between my work and theirs. They focused on simplifying motifs, creating strong, distinct symbols, and using a limited colour palette to build an image. They also used humour, playing with form and text in clever ways. Some of their works are truly genius.
NAH: How do you reflect on your own work in relation to American Pop Art from the ’50s?
TK: I’ve looked a lot at American Pop Art, like the work of Ed Ruscha for example — there are many similarities between what he was doing and the Polish School of Posters. Maybe because I didn’t grow up with art, Pop Art just resonated with me early on. I remember being shown Roy Lichtenstein’s work and being told it was one of the most important art movements of the 20th century — something just clicked for me. Pop Art felt like a reaction against traditional still life, which I found boring at the time. Over time, however, I’ve moved away from Pop Art and shifted focus toward the more modest Polish painting tradition, like the work of Andrzej Wróblewski or Józef Czapski. I don’t want to say it’s more ambitious, but I like how it’s understated. Pop culture is still very important to me. Film posters have been a major source of inspiration — and I love music.
NAH: I see you have Spotify open. Do you always listen to music when you paint?
TK: I always listen to music in the studio, or sometimes podcasts.
NAH: What are you listening to right now?
TK: Silver Apples. I saw them live a few years ago at the OFF Festival in Katowice. He was pretty old — kind of like a grandpa — but he played very interesting electronic music. But sometimes I listen to more serious or even aggressive music. And sometimes it’s just songs from the radio, like Dua Lipa. It all depends on the energy of the painting.
Written by Nora Arrhenius Hagdahl
Tomasz Kręcicki’s solo exhibition Move will run from 13 March to 17 April 2025 at Esther Schipper, Berlin.
