Robert Sokolowski

Robert Sokolowski – an artist-painter with 25 years of creative work experience. For several years, he has been running his own art gallery. The gallery is an important point on the cultural map of his home city, visited by guests from Poland and other countries who are looking for knowledge about the art, aesthetics and unique cultural values of northern Mazovia.

The painter often leaves the safe space of his studio and turns summer seasons into an artistic journey around the Hel Peninsula to explore the theme of the Baltic Sea, for which he uses the formula of the Outdoor Gallery in Jurata. For 25 years (during the summer season) he has been carrying out his own open-space painting projects on the Baltic Sea, referring to Polish maritime traditions (M. Mokwa, A. Suchanek W. Nalecz), which in the interwar period escalated with an eruption of talents and great artistic personalities, which was directly related to Poland's regaining independence and access to the sea. With his work, which relates directly to the landscape and elements of traditional Kashubian culture, he conducts a lively dialogue with the painting tradition, where painting skills are important, but also participant observation, an attempt to capture the changing landscape, the passing of seasons, the search for the perfect light.

He creates in several painting and drawing techniques: oil on canvas, acrylic on canvas, watercolor, dry pastel, ink and pencil drawing.

The aim of Robert Sokolowski's artistic search is to strive for simplicity and harmony through the complementarity of the form and content of the work, where very often the cultural landscape is the background for universal representations. The search for his own painting form is stretched between the dominant, traditionally understood realism - and the abstract approach to the subject.

To achieve expression, synthesis, symbolism and an abstract approach, the artist reaches for various painting techniques (oil, acrylic and watercolor). Some of the works, where detail, precision and documentation are important, use drawing techniques - pastel, pen and pencil drawing. It often creates the so-called magical realism, where ethnoregionalism is framed in a fairy-tale narrative with a rich color dominant, and the visual background is made up of unique aspects of culture, history and nature. He builds compositions of paintings in a balanced way, sometimes with one dominant, reinforced with a varied use of texture to emphasize the matter of compositional elements.