Marcin Dudek

Marcin Dudek first presented Head in the Sand at the opening of a show in the spring of 2022. For this performance, the artist built a box inside the gallery’s central space in the exact dimensions of his childhood bedroom, 2.5 X 3.5 meters. The door to this box and its back window are both original features from his Krakow home, complete with a heavy concrete windowsill, a cracked relic of Soviet social housing architecture.

Inside this room, Dudek created a horizontal pattern of medical tape across the perimeter of the four walls. This tape runs the perimeter of the four walls, and after painting it white he hand-transferred images onto it from his early life. As a child, his artistic education was forged in the pages of “Wielcy Malarze” - “Great Painters” magazine. He traced a horizontal line all around the medical tape with the magazine’s pages, in full spreads placed edge-to-edge.

This mural read as a jumbled chronology of art history and the artist’s first 20 years of life (the time he spent in that room). Masterpieces from different eras are spliced in with images of young men and football matches, Francis Bacon and drunken violence.

During the performance, he interacted with this installation: he scarred the walls from the outside, then punched holes in them from the inside. He lit a cerulean blue flare inside the room and used it to trace a thick line across his magazine wallpaper, while smoke oozed through the holes and quickly filled the gallery space. Then he used the concrete slab to destroy a whole segment of the wall, using this new gash to exit the thick air of the box, disappearing into the crowd of visitors streaming outside.

After the performance, the installation remained in place for the rest of the show, with the concrete windowsill still embedded in the destroyed plasterboard and the blue flare line still smelling vaguely of sulfur. Head in the Sand invited reflection on the presence of the past, its weight and its wisdom. Dudek had cracked this memory box, to make way for new creation.

The performance is given a new life in this collage by the same name. While taking apart his installation after the show, the artist lifted a fragment from his magazine timeline and used it as the starting point for his new composition. In doing so, Dudek blurs the distinction between past and present work. While the performance is ephemeral, the Head in the Sand collage is here to stay, preserving a trace of the gesture.

In the collage, the blue line crosses the frame horizontally at 130 centimeters high. This is a conscious nod to the avant-garde Polish artist Edward Krasinski, who during his life and career placed blue lines of scotch tape “at the height of 130 centimeters, ‘everywhere and on everything’”. Dudek extends this line into his own work, in his own play on art history. Head in the Sand touches the point where the past and present are two different, yet continuous energies.