Robert Sokolowski, Slow life and the sun 779, 2023.

Acrylic painting on canvas, 40 x 80 cm

Robert Sokolowski - an artist-painter with 25 years of creative work experience. For more than a dozen years he has been running his own Art Gallery "Aporia" on the Old Market Square in Lomza. The gallery is an important point on the cultural map of Lomza, visited by visitors from Poland and other countries who seek knowledge about art, aesthetics and the unique cultural qualities of northern Mazovia.

The painter often leaves the safe space of the studio and turns the 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 Open Air Gallery in Jurata. For the past 25 years (during the holiday season), he has been carrying out authorial painting projects on the Baltic Sea in open space, referring to Polish maritime traditions (M. Mokwa, A. Suchanek W. Nałęcz), which escalated in the interwar period with an eruption of talents and great artistic personalities, which was directly linked to Poland's regaining of independence and access to the sea. With his work, which refers directly to the landscape and elements of traditional Kashubian culture, he conducts a lively dialogue with the painting tradition, where painting technique is important, but also participatory observation, an attempt to capture the changing landscape, the transience of the seasons, and the search for ideal light.

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

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

To achieve expression, synthesis, symbolism and an abstract approach, the artist reaches for various painting techniques (oil, acrylic paints and watercolor). Some of the works, where detail, precision and documentary layer are important, he uses drawing techniques - pastel, pen and pencil drawing. He often creates in the convention of so-called magic realism, where ethno-regionalism is framed by a fairy-tale narrative with rich color dominance, and the visual background is unique aspects of culture, history and nature. He builds the compositions of his paintings in a balanced way, sometimes with a single dominant, enhanced by the varied use of texture to emphasize the matter of compositional elements.