"Węglin"Community Centre would like to invite viewers to an exhibition entitled Collectors’ Kiosk – Marian Stępak “Wanderers” (Wędrowcy)
Marian Stępak was born in 1957 in Koronowo; he graduated from the Fine Arts Secondary School in Bydgoszcz and from the Departament of Fine Arts at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń where he received a diploma in 1983. Currently, he is working as an associate professor at the NCU. Stępak presented his works at over forty individual and numerous collective exhibitions in Poland and abroad. He also collects textiles. The Artist writes about his project:
Since graduation, my artistic interests have revolved around various materials, textiles in particular once their primary, practical function as clothes, tablecloths, bedlinen or curtains ends. The exhibition for the Collectors’ Kiosk in Lublin relates to headwear accessories, mainly hats, pillbox hats and caps. They come in a variety of shapes and wander around the world with their users who mark out their irregular paths. When I mention orbiting and wandering, it makes sense to relate it to the movement of planets in the Solar System. The comparison may be a little risky, however we should bear in mind that in my project I’m trying to merge two separate phenomena, one very logical and organized – the movement of planets around the Sun, and the other quite chaotic, I guess – wander of hats and all kind of their headwear cousins.
About the Collectors’ Kiosk”:
Though the cycle of presentations at the „Kiosk with Art – Collectors’ Kiosk”, we would like to present collections of Węglin residents in a broader context of visual arts. Contemporary artists are often inspired by contents of home archives, compilations and private collections; they develop the ideas based on them into original artistic projects. At the same time, the passion for collecting often combined with a thorough familiarity with the subject is worth a closer look.
Ludomir Franczak is the curator of the exhibition. As a part of the Collectors’ Kiosk, we want to create a local collection of headwear which would be co-created by local residents and exhibited inside the kiosk.
The Collectors’ Kiosk project one of the activities carried out by the Węglin Art Gallery. The Gallery operates at the junction of disciplines and attempts to show a wide spectrum of phenomena related to contemporary art.