Sławomir Elsner

In the artist's words:

Slawomir Elsner (born in 1976 in Poland) lives and works in Berlin. He gained international recognition for his meticulous colored-pencil drawings and extensive watercolor works. In his series “Imaginary Memory,” which currently comprises about 150 works and is still in progress, the artist has focused since 2014 on canonical works of art history, which he poetically reinterprets as colored-pencil drawings on paper using a unique technique involving an interwoven network of overlapping colored lines. More recently, some of the watercolors in his renowned series “Just Watercolors,” executed on handmade paper, have also begun to reference iconic paintings, thereby transcending their inherent self-referentiality, which is based on their heightened degree of abstraction. These complex, delicate, and meticulously crafted works on paper blur the boundaries between drawing and painting; they are both—and at the same time, something entirely different. They seem not only to definitively resolve the age-old art-historical dichotomy between disegno and colore, but also to render it entirely obsolete. Slawomir Elsner skillfully fuses painting and drawing; he is a line painter, oscillating between chance and construction, between blurriness and precision.

Slawomir Elsner’s works are held in renowned collections around the world, including the KiCo Foundation, on permanent loan to the Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany; the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA; the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, Charlotte, USA; the Roche Collection, Basel, Switzerland; the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany; the Adrastus Collection, Arévalo, Spain; and the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany.