The New Android | Piotr Krzymowski
What will humans look like in the future? What are mobile phones doing to our minds? Who is watching me? These questions are central to Piotr Krzymowski’s work, as he fuses modern and digital technology with the traditional practices of sculpture and painting, in response to the ways we live our lives in the 21st century.
Swombie 1.7 Cast glass head, keyboards treated with copper sulphate. Piotr Krzymowski
These ideas can be seen straight off in Krzymowski’s Swombies; glass models of humans heads, containing old internet cables and machinery covered in acid, these electronics innards slowly degrading. The title of these pieces refers to a new word coined in Germany, a portmanteau of zombie and smartphone.
It conjures immediately the image of humans staggering aimlessly around cities, glued to their screens and oblivious to the world around them. Like something out of a Black Mirror episode, the featureless faces describe a scary future; where our bodies and minds have become empty, filled only with the insidious nuts and bolts of machines.
“The future loves us, but doesn’t need us”
Krzymowski plays with similar concepts in his thermochromic prints - heat sensitive works that respond and change colour when you touch them. At first thought on seeing the words ‘heat sensitive’ were the dodgy 90s t-shirts I wore as a child, but these are much more enigmatic – and more sinister – than that.
Krzymowski has turned the modern practice of swiping into a brushstroke, creating marks that swirl around and emerge out of their dark backgrounds. Some almost begin to look like faces from a Francis Bacon painting.
16072019. Thermochronic Screenprint - Piotr Krzymowski
All thermochromic screenprints are scans of the fingerprints of the artist collected from the screen of his iPhone, uncovered using a aluminium powder, usually reserved for criminologists.
Then processed with rare thermochronic ink, that reacts to heat and disappears once in contact with the human body. This reveals a tapestry of spontaneous, tactile gestures of the artists identity
Seeing the fingerprints up close makes me think of a crime scene, dusted for prints in a search for the perpetrators identity. Krzymowski invites you to interact with the works, to swipe them yourselves and leave your own mark. Leaving you to wonder, how much of ourselves, of our identity, are we giving away to others every time we touch a phone screen?