VIEWING ROOM:
Paul Narkiewicz
Paul Narkiewicz is the recipient of Black Ball Projects’ 2023 Micro-Grant.
Interview with Paul Narkiewicz below
Publications
Megan Mi-Ai Lee and Derek Weisberg. A Figure Enters. New York: Greenwich House Pottery, 2023
Links/Press
Paul Narkiewicz “Census” at Laurence Miller Gallery, NY Art Beat
City as Sculpture Garden: Seeing the New and Daring, NY Times, 1987
A Figure Enters at the Jane Hartsook Gallery
Paul Narkiewicz is the recipient of the 2023 Black Ball Projects micro-grant.
Paul Narkiewicz was born in 1937 in Easton, PA, and studied painting at the Philadelphia College of Art in the early 1960's. After moving to New York City in 1966, he worked in painting, sculpture, and printmaking, and exhibited his work throughout the 1980’s. In 2010, he began to prolifically make intimately scaled ceramic sculptures, and has begun exhibiting work again, with the new works shown alongside his archival paintings and prints.
Paul maintains that he is a sculptor rather than a ceramicist, and has always had an interdisciplinary practice in which one body of work informs the other. Originally trained as a printmaker, Paul demonstrates a lithographer and etcher’s sensitivity to each of these elements. Each figure informs the next, and en masse they form a crowd that only emphasizes each piece's distinct character.
His work has been exhibited at the Jane Hartsook Gallery (New York, NY; 2023), Laurence Miller Gallery (New York, NY; 2015, 2016), Socrates Sculpture Park (Long Island City, NY; 1987), and Kornblee Gallery (New York, NY; 1981).
His work is held in numerous collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Princeton University Art Museum, the RISD Museum, and the University of the Arts (formerly Philadelphia College of Art).
A master printmaker, Narkiewicz collaborated with many artists on their lithograph and etching editions, including Romare Bearden, Alex Katz and Ellsworth Kelly.
A FIGURE ENTERS
Installation View, A Figure Enters, 2022
Keri
3 x 3 x 7 inches, stoneware, wire, 2010-2022
A Figure Enters, presented by The Jane Hartsook Gallery , 2023.
A solo exhibition of work by Paul Narkiewicz, curated by Megan Mi-Ai Lee.
Photography by Alan Wiener
“The ancient Romans said, ‘Repetitio est mater studiorum,’ or ‘repetition is the mother of all learning.‘ Paul’s steadfast, almost obsessive desire to create through repetition is wonderful proof of this quote. He has amassed a family, or community, or army of sculptures. There is power in numbers; multiples make an impact. Paul estimates that he has made just over 600. His army is growing—he makes 5 or 6 a week—and they continue to evolve through blissful ignorance. And so it is not necessity, but fabulous repetitive mistakes which are the mother of Paul’s inventions.”
- Derek Weisberg
Excerpted from “Always Repeat the Same Mistake Twice”
A Figure Enters
Installation Detail, A Figure Enters, 2022
Installation View, A Figure Enters, 2022
WATERCOLORS
Crespina II
13 x 15 inches, watercolor on paper, 1977. Photo by Alan Wiener.
“In the summers of the 1970s, Paul Narkiewicz and his family traveled to Crespina, Italy, where he made plein air watercolors of the countryside. These paintings strip down the landscape into fundamental gestures, breaking down rolling hills, vineyards, and foliage into distinct blocks of vibrating color. In the world of these watercolors, trees can be read as figures in their own right. Like the rückenfigur of German Romantic painting, these trees act as a stand-in for the viewer, inviting not just the appreciation of the sublime landscape, but also highlighting the importance of the act of looking itself. Rather than proposing his paintings as a backdrop for his ceramic figures, this cross-decade pairing of paintings and sculptures considers the subjects of both as one and the same. The trees are characters and the ceramic figures are landscape. Brought together for the first time, Paul’s works pose the question, why can’t a tree be a rückenfigur, and seas of figures a landscape?”
-Megan Mi-Ai Lee, from A Figure Enters
OTHER MEDIA
A Figure Enters
14 x 20 inches, oil on linen, 1977
Blue and White
Oil on canvas, 1970
Tertius
19 x 24 inches, serigraph, ~1970
Untitled
26 x 30 inches, lithograph, edition 3/27, ~1970
Open Field
28 x 23 inches, pochior lithograph on paper, 1979
Lifeguard Chair
12 x 6 x 6 inches, wood, collage, 1987
In 1987, Paul debuted Lifeguard Chair, his first public sculpture, in Socrates Sculpture Park’s second exhibition on the Long Island City waterfront. Working alongside sculptor Mark DiSuvero, artists installed public artworks overlooking the East River on a plot of land in transition from illegal dumpsite to exhibition space.
IN THE STUDIO
Excerpt, Trevor King's At a Certain Pace, 2021
“I think certain aspects of my work have to do with just compulsive behavior, I kind of make the same figure over and over. I kind of figured that when they became repetitive I would stop, but that hasn’t happened yet, there seems to be enough variation from moment to moment that I continue with them.”
-Paul Narkiewicz
Interview with Paul Narkiewicz
Megan Mi-Ai Lee is an interdisciplinary artist and curator who also works as the Education Manager at Greenwich House. Because of her deep and ongoing relationship with Paul Narkiewicz, she was able to not only facilitate the collection of his archival works to present in this viewing room, but also to interview him — not a small feat, since, as she says, he’s a “man of few words”.
Read the full interview here
A very special thanks to Megan Mi-Ai Lee and Greenwich House Pottery for making this viewing room possible.