'IT'S DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN SO I STAY QUIET' by Lukas Glinkowski at Galería Fran Reus, Palma

There are countless unanswered questions in painting. The painter Lukas Glinkowski, who lives in Berlin but was born in Poland and trained in Düsseldorf, does not even try to answer them. Instead, he constantly asks himself, and us, new ones. 

Analogous to sampling in music, he presents a visual mash-up in his works. Fragments and props are transformed into a new whole whose meaning the viewers configure themselves: art- historical quotations and contemporary references are aesthetic or conceptual pointers without a pointing finger. In Glinkowski ́s painting it is not a matter of proposing a harmonious, coherent meaning, but of in dividual access, in which the viewpoint of the artist and that of the viewer need not necessarily coincide. This decidedly postmodern approach creates space for him to play with our seeing and thinking habits, a game which simultaneously permits chance, chaos and plurality or even brings the incommensurable together. 

Lukas Glinkowski transports us into a pictorial world which derives from his everyday observations and experiences, sometimes perhaps also dreams or idealisation: urban spaces, films, track lists, cartoons, video games, pop and club culture. In recent years he has increasingly abandoned the canvas; tiles, photographic and woodchip wallpaper, mirror tiles and films, wood and glass have become the carriers for his painting. And because he is particularly interested in subculture, the places he conjures up are often as morbid as they are trashy, and his constructions consist of ordinary industrial products. The texture of the objects he constructs himself thus determine a „spatial occupation“ by his painting, which in any case is not restricted to the hanging on the wall - sometimes the visitors to the exhibition are even invited to (participate in the) paint(ing). Possibly in order to show us that his world is actually one which we can discover anew with our own eyes by seeing it his way. He does not want to explain it to us, but as so often in life, well-posed questions are more illuminating than precise answers. 

— Peter Ungeheuer