Mikołaj Sobczak “Moon, Sun, Mercury”

Curator: Mirela Baciak

Mikołaj Sobczak’s exhibition Moon, Sun, Mercury assembles a fractured history of resistance, propaganda, and survival. Across three large-scale paintings and subtle footnotes, Sobczak draws from communist posters, esoteric traditions, queer archives, and contemporary technofeudal critiques to sketch a portrait of power and its breakdown.

The exhibition is not organized around grand historical narratives or mythic timelines; instead, it stages a choreography of protagonists—queer activists, exiles, revolutionaries, outlaws—whose entangled lives reveal the fractures of history and the unfinished work of resistance.

At the center of the exhibition stands Sun, a work that confronts the aesthetic and political dimensions of magical realism. Far from an escapist fantasy, magical realism is presented here as a tool of survival in the face of violence and systemic erasure. Sobczak assembles a vivid ensemble: a revolutionary woman drawn from communist propaganda, standing in a posture echoing the Magus of the Tarot; Goethe invoked as a beacon against reactionary romanticism, as Thomas Mann once urged; poisonous plants like mandrake and belladonna, historically employed in rebellion against feudal lords.

If Sun charts a landscape of resistance, Moon plunges into a field of disorientation. Here, Sobczak stages a collision between capitalist iconography, fascist grotesques, and present-day humanitarian crises. The “Knight of Capitalism,” drawn from Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s analysis of capitalism's evolving legitimations, is transformed into a monstrous amalgam of George Grosz’s fascist caricatures and contemporary technofeudal motifs. Sobczak’s Iron Man figure locks a broken barrel labeled “capitalism” into a fascist ring, visualizing the transition from capitalist deregulation to authoritarian closure described by theorists like Przemysław Wielgosz.

Mercury shifts the focus to the machinery of thought: the cognitive maps through which power reproduces itself, and the cracks where alternative knowledges persist. The figure of Eve Adams, the Polish-Jewish immigrant whose pioneering lesbian writing led to her deportation from the USA and death in Auschwitz, anchors the work’s exploration of surveillance, morality, and state violence. Margaret Leonard, the plainclothes officer who entrapped Adams, reappears not as a historical footnote but as an active agent in a continuum of criminalization and erasure. Other figures surface: Catherine Deneuve, in her role in Belle de Jour, embodies the fascist bifurcation of femininity into sacred motherhood and demonized sexuality. Stanisław Chmielewski—whose nickname “Dobry Stasio” (Good Stasio) evokes not just personal warmth but a quietly heroic network of gay men who forged false documents and smuggled Jews out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Narcissism, amplified by social media economies, emerges as a new terrain where surveillance and self-performance merge. 

Sobczak’s approach is one where images collide, symbols fracture, and narratives tangle into dense constellations. Painting becomes both tool and weapon, exposing how history is written, distorted, and sometimes reclaimed. The painter himself is not separate from these histories; he is implicated within it, caught between the forces he tries to reveal and those he cannot fully escape.

Moon, Sun, Mercury is a practice in assembling counter-histories. It is also, more urgently, a rehearsal of anti-fascist aesthetics for a present in which the battle over images, narratives, and bodies remains very far from over.

Opening: 16.05.2025 20:00
21:00 Performance: Anti-Fascist Art Manifesto by Mikołaj Sobczak
in the context of wild thinX: non-conformist practices in architecture, design and art

Address:

Salzburger Kunstverein

Hellbrunner Straße 3
5020 Salzburg
Österreich

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