STEFAN PIETRYGA Passagen

Paintings and Sculptures

Stefan Pietryga is a painter and sculptor. One of the main figures in his sculptural work is certainly the poplar, mainly in wood and with colour, blue like the sky, but also cast in bronze, patinated green and black. His interest in this particular type of tree stems from an intensive study of Romanesque buildings. Pietryga uses a saw and axe to carve rough and angular shapes out of the wood. To emphasise them in the landscape, he paints them in ultramarine to evoke ideas of sky, depth, transcendence and immateriality.
Another part of Pietryga’s artistic statement are his watercolours. In the large formats on paper, the never monochrome colour surface itself begins to move, becoming a mirror image of the step sequences of the dancing crowd, whose pattern in turn defines the place or colour landscape where the movements take place. We see figures that are located at several, at a multitude of topographical points at the same time, because in themselves the coloured schemes are without individuality, without their own identity. They are variations of a fundamental figure: the passer-by. The passer-by determines the contours of a place through his paths and the speed of his movement.