PAWEL KRUK

POLAND-U.S. ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE EXCHANGE PROGRAM

Residency: SEPTEMBER 11 – DECEMBER 12, 2007

Headlands Center for the Arts , Sausalito, CA

Exhibition: DECEMBER 13, 2007 - FEBRUARY 28, 2008

The Pirate Store, 826 Valencia Street, San Francisco

Pawel Kruk, M A Y D A Y¸ video still from 826 Valencia Street/The Pirate Store project, San Francisco, 2007

Pawel Kruk's (1976) multimedia works appropriate borrowed material drawn from the creative works of his personal heroes larger-than-life public figures, exploring the ideas of celebrity and idolatry in the art world and popular culture. In Larger than Life, 2000, Kruk staged an interview with Michael Jordan, casting himself as the basketball star, raising questions of authenticity and our collective obsession with stardom through his performance. Kruk has also examined the public and private faces that he personally puts on as an artist in such works as Messiah College, 2002.

For his latest project Kruk has explored the early work of renowned Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, delving into Murakami's first published work Hear the Wind Sing. Kruk has created an installation for the Pirate Store's storefront window at 826 Valencia Street in San Francisco based on the cover illustration of that novel, which coincidentally contains the numbers "826". While developing this installation, he has simultaneously undertaken to reprint the original text as a letterpress work, making the work his own through the act of creating it new, letter by painstaking letter.

Kruk has shown work in several solo exhibitions in Poznan and Warsaw, Poland, and his work has been included in a number of group exhibitions in Europe and the United States, including The American Effect at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Kruk holds a degree in drawing from The Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland.

Conceived and produced in partnership with the Artist-in-Residence Program of the Headlands Center for the Arts and A-I-R at the Centre for Contemporary Art “Ujazdowski Castle”, Warsaw, Poland, this project has been generously supported by the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Poland, and the Polish Cultural Institute, New York, and organized in cooperation with as part of the POLAND-U.S. ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE EXCHANGE PROGRAM, conceived by the Polish Cultural Institute, New York.

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