The Town That Never Left
Some cities never truly leave us.
We may travel very far away.
Change our language.
Our address.
Our everyday life.
Learn to live in an entirely different place.
And yet, there are cities that continue to exist within us.
Not because they can still be found on a map.
But because, with time, they begin to live inside us.
They cease to be merely places.
They become a way of seeing the world.
Perhaps that is why some artists spend their entire lives painting not places themselves, but what remains after them.
Not memories.
Their traces.
The Early Years
Jerzy Kubina was born in 1956 in Zamość — a city that would return years later in his art, not as a depiction of a place, but as an inner presence.
Before painting became the central field of his artistic practice, he spent many years studying the piano and the violin. Music was his first artistic language. Although painting eventually became his primary means of expression, music never disappeared from his work. It returned years later in his performances, in the way he constructed space, and above all in rhythm — one of the most distinctive qualities of his art.
Perhaps that is why Jerzy Kubina’s paintings never impose themselves on the viewer. They do not reveal everything at once. Like music, they require time, silence, and attentive observation.
The Academy
Jerzy Kubina’s path to painting led through the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków — a place where the young artist developed his craft and gradually discovered his own way of seeing.
He studied in the studio of Professor Jan Szancenbach, a painter and educator for whom craftsmanship, attentive observation, and respect for the material nature of painting formed the foundation of his artistic thinking. It was there that Jerzy Kubina developed not only technical mastery, but also discipline, patience, and responsibility for every gesture left on the canvas.
In 1985, he graduated from the Academy with distinction.
Yet this was not the end of his education.
It was the beginning of a search for his own artistic language — a path that would define his entire later practice.
Across the Ocean
In 1987, Jerzy Kubina left Poland. It was far more than a geographical move. It was a decision made at a time of profound political and social transformation, when the lives of many people of his generation were being reshaped by difficult choices about the future.
New York became his new home — a city of a completely different rhythm, energy, and scale. For many artists, it was a place of constant movement, a meeting point of different cultures and artistic languages, but also a space that demanded courage, perseverance, and the determination to find one’s own place.
For Jerzy Kubina, it was not a beginning without a past.
It was the beginning of a new chapter.
A moment when academic training met personal experience, and the technical mastery he had developed began to serve the creation of an individual artistic language.
It was in New York that the artistic language that would bring Jerzy Kubina international recognition in the years to come began to take shape.
New York
New York soon became far more than a new address.
Shortly after his arrival, Jerzy Kubina was given the opportunity by the collector and patron of the arts Henryk Lachman to establish a studio in the former Hotel Hamilton — a monumental, abandoned building that would become the place where he worked and conducted his artistic experiments for the following four years.
It was there that he created large-scale paintings and installations requiring space, scale, and a freedom that could not be found in a traditional studio. The interiors of the former hotel were not merely a place of work. They became part of the creative process — a space in which painting began to enter into a dialogue with architecture, scale, and the physical presence of the viewer.
During this period, he also began collaborating with Prisunic Gallery in New York’s Greenwich Village, directed by the Parisian art dealers Paul and Benjamin Steinitz. It was one of the first important steps toward his international presence as an artist.
New York became the place where the experience gained at the Academy in Kraków met a new reality. It was here that the artistic language began to mature — the language that in the years to come would bring Jerzy Kubina recognition in Europe and the United States.
International Recognition
The 1990s were a period in which Jerzy Kubina’s work began to move beyond the boundaries of the New York art scene and enter the international stage.
His works were presented in institutions and galleries with different traditions and cultural contexts. Among them were the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, Zachęta — National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Galerie Louis XIV in Paris, OK Harris Works of Art in New York’s SoHo district, and the Chelsea Art Museum.
With each successive exhibition, interest grew among critics, art historians, and curators. Kubina’s work was discussed by, among others, the French curator Ami Barak and the art historian and critic Marek Bartelik, whose writings for Artforum have long contributed to the international discourse on contemporary art.
This recognition was never the result of a passing fashion.
Jerzy Kubina has never been an artist who followed prevailing trends. Instead, he has consistently developed his own artistic language — one rooted in material, structure, and experience. It is this commitment to his own path that makes his work immediately recognisable, regardless of where it is presented.
His presence in respected institutions, together with the attention of critics and publications in Artforum and other important art journals, established Jerzy Kubina’s position among Polish artists of his generation who built an international career after leaving Poland while remaining faithful to their own vision.
Today, his works are held in private collections and in institutional collections dedicated to contemporary art.
Yet the most important chapter of this story was still to come.
Iconostasis
In 1993, Galerie Louis XIV in Paris presented Iconostasis — a monumental series that became one of the defining moments in Jerzy Kubina’s artistic journey.
These were not paintings created to please.
They were an experience.
Each work existed somewhere between painting and object. Raw canvas, dense layers of painted substance, sand, graphite and dust transformed the surface of the work. It no longer simply represented reality.
It began to carry its traces.
Art historian Marek Bartelik described these monumental works as existing between image and space. Referring to the meaning of the iconostasis — the screen separating the sanctuary from the nave in the tradition of Eastern Christian churches — he observed that Kubina’s works become both image and threshold.
They do not refer to traditional religious iconography. Instead, they attempt to approach what remains invisible, unspoken and difficult to represent.
Their surfaces evoke cracked earth.
Scarred skin.
Matter marked by the passage of time.
In many works, a wooden structure hidden within pushes the canvas outward from the inside, stretching it almost to the limits of its endurance. The surface of the painting seems to resist its own materiality, as if an invisible force were attempting to reveal what lies beneath its layers.
The French curator Ami Barak recognised in Kubina’s work a continuous crossing of boundaries between painting and space. Marek Bartelik, in turn, emphasised the physical character of these surfaces — their traces of fracture, tension and the passage of time.
Although they approached Kubina’s work from different perspectives, both pointed toward a shared dimension: his works are not merely images to be viewed.
They are spaces where matter, memory and experience meet.
The Language of Matter
Jerzy Kubina’s work resists being described solely in terms of painting.
His works do not end at the surface of the canvas. They enter into a relationship with space, light and the physical presence of the viewer. Painted matter ceases to function merely as colour. It becomes a substance — dense, tactile and almost sculptural in its power of expression.
Sand.
Graphite.
Dust.
Raw canvas.
None of these materials appears by chance. Each carries its own texture, weight and memory. Layer upon layer, they create surfaces that evoke cracked earth, weathered walls or structures marked by the passage of time.
In many works, the canvas is torn, stitched back together or stretched almost to the limits of its endurance. It ceases to be a passive support for the image. It becomes an active part of the work itself.
Matter itself preserves the story.
It does not describe what has passed.
It does not represent what remains invisible.
It becomes the place where they remain present.
That is why Kubina’s work cannot be understood solely within the realm of abstraction. His paintings are not merely arrangements of forms and colours. They are records of tension between what is visible and what remains hidden.
In Kubina’s work, time does not pass.
It settles onto the surface of the canvas like another layer of painted matter.
A Ceaseless Quest
Jerzy Kubina’s artistic practice has always remained a process of continuous exploration.
Although painting was the foundation of his artistic language, over the years he consistently moved beyond its traditional boundaries. He turned toward monumental installations, performance and spatial interventions, where the image ceased to exist as an autonomous object and became part of a larger composition — shaped by space, light and the presence of the viewer.
Music, the first language of his artistic journey, never disappeared from his work. Years later, it returned in his performances, where sound, movement and image formed a single artistic expression. They were not separate disciplines, but different ways of expressing the same creative impulse.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, his attention turned toward new materials. Alongside dense painted matter appeared silk and translucent fabrics, allowing light to assume a role equal to colour and structure. Transparency itself became another artistic medium.
The American critic Mary Shustack observed that Kubina’s studio practice resembles the work of a laboratory. Layers, textures and light are subjected to continuous experimentation, revealing an artist who explores new relationships between matter, space and perception.
The materials changed.
The means of expression changed.
One thing remained constant.
The search for a form in which matter, light and space could speak in their own language.
Return to Zamość
After years spent in New York, after exhibitions across Europe and the United States, after monumental creations and decades of artistic exploration, Jerzy Kubina returned to the place where everything had begun.
Not to close a chapter.
But to look at it anew.
The exhibition Zamość, Zamość was more than a return to his hometown.
It was an encounter with what remained.
The artist began working with transparent and translucent materials that had become an important element of his practice since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Light passing through successive layers of fabric began to play a role equal to colour, structure and matter.
Jerzy Kubina wrote:
“Zamość is more than a place for me. It is a reality that no longer exists, yet one that I carry within me like a talisman.”
These words return like an echo of his entire artistic journey.
Zamość was never simply a city.
It was a beginning — a place that remained present despite time and distance.
It became an invisible thread connecting his first musical experiences, his years at the Academy in Kraków, New York, Iconostasis, and every subsequent stage of his artistic search.
Some cities never truly leave us.
A Personal Encounter with Jerzy Kubina’s Work
Author's Note
Some encounters appear to happen by chance.
And yet, with time, we discover that they had their place in our journey.
Jerzy Kubina began his artistic path with music.
I, too, spent many years learning to listen to the world in this way.
Perhaps that is why his paintings spoke to me so naturally.
First, I heard them.
Only later did I begin to see them.
Within them, I found rhythm.
Silence.
Tension.
Pause.
Everything I had once searched for in music, I now find in matter, light and colour.
This text was never written to confine Jerzy Kubina’s work to a single interpretation. Great art always leaves a space that cannot be fully described.
I would like to invite the reader to such an encounter.
Because I believe that works which remain with us for a lifetime are born when an artist remains faithful to his own path.
