Name Bogdan Perzynski | Role Artist | |
Bogdan P. K. Perzyński (born in 1954 in Poznań, Poland) is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Austin, Texas.
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Education
Perzyński was trained in law at the University of Adam Mickiewicz, Poznań, and in architecture, and fine arts at the Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Sztuk Plastycznych, Poznań (now the University of Fine Arts in Poznań), where he earned his fine arts degree in 1979 from with a specialization in Painting. During this time he abandoned traditionally defined art for a more open-ended art practice.
Career
Perzyński's first solo show was at the Akumulatory 2, a non-profit art gallery. From 1979-83, he taught at Poznań’s Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Sztuk Plastycznych. Throughout this time, he travelled frequently to West Berlin, and in 1983 moved to Hamburg. The following year he relocated to Santa Barbara, California, and began teaching at the University of California Santa Barbara. Since 1987 he has been on the faculty in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he co-founded the Transmedia area of studies. He maintains an American, and a Polish residence.
Style
Perzyński approaches his work as an organism rather than an object. His practice focuses on the interdisciplinary aspects of art. Drawing upon the philosophies of communicative action, social pragmatism, and individual invention, by necessity it embodies and embraces complexity. His recent work concentrates on computational fluid dynamics, and contemporary data collection, retention and visualization, particularly as they pertain to the future's ecology. He has worked with installation art since 1978, and in 1990 began working with sound, video, sensors and body-based interactivity. For over 35 years, he has produced works that respond to architectural contexts. His work has been presented in Argentina, Brazil, China, Germany, Greece, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Thailand, New Zealand, and the United States.
Perzyński’s early artworks investigated the discourses of public space, cinema, and philosophy, culminating in a period during the late 1980s-early 1990s characterized by a series of intricate large-scale installations, shown widely, including at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, PA.
From 2004-10 Perzyński created the major full-length video work Fortune Teller. The video drew inspiration from the artist's own biographical experiences and how they seemed to uncannily intersect with horoscope entries from Vogue magazine. The resultant video collecting twelve short vignettes, none longer than five minutes, incorporates a wide range of cultural reference points from new physics and technologies to Brion Gysin's Dream Machine. Fortune Teller screened at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision (formerly Film Archive) in Wellington, New Zealand.