About

My paintings are inquiries into the process of embodied looking. I am drawn towards images that record the sensory experience of living in, and through, the fallible human body: whether in the attempts to construct and control the body through social media, or the traces of the human presence left behind in everyday domestic spaces. Found images are explored alongside those derived from personal archives; both are manipulated through cropping, enlargement, and manual translation, bringing somatic qualities of the hand into the process.

The objective of building a tactile surface creates contingencies such as abstractions of form, shakiness of line, and omissions of details. This means losing the indexical information of the photo in exchange for enhancement of subjective experience. The fragmentation of the painted image mirrors my own incapacity to see my body as whole.

Painting dismembers an image – slows it down – in the inverse of the speed and distraction the media environment thrives upon. Painting, both in process and as object, reasserts the physicality of being that has been increasingly evacuated from daily life. I am interested in painting’s capacity for a critical deceleration of the familiar and banal. Both paint and the body have traction. They are slow, confused, and full of contradiction.

The direct mark, flawed and vulnerable, becomes an allegory of the body’s tenuous relationship with the world. It is also what connects us. Painting brings the body back.


Michael Antkowiak (Warsaw, 1977) is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design and completed his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2003. He has since exhibited in public and commercial galleries in Canada and abroad, including the Queens Museum of Art in New York City, and Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago, Il. Michael is a recipient of several artist’s grants and residencies, including the Ontario Arts Council Grant, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. In addition to his studio practice in Toronto, Michael teaches with the Faculty of Art at OCAD University and with the Art and Art History Program - Department of Visual Studies, UTM/Sheridan College.

Michael Antkowiak wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council through the Visual Artists: Emerging grant.