About

My paintings are inquiries into the process of embodied looking. I am interested in images that attempt to record the sensory experience of living in, and through, the fallible human body: whether in the efforts to construct and control the body through media, or in the traces of my own body left behind in the everyday domestic space. My paintings translate the temporal and quotidian through a free-hand mark making process, distorting and displacing mediated and disembodied experience into a corporeal ever-present.

My 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 the enhancement of subjective experience. The fragmentation of the painted image mirrors my own incapacity to see my body as whole. Throughout my life, I observed my father’s disabled body struggle and maneuver through the world and have watched his genetic markings manifest in my own body. My resulting disability has gifted me with a sharp awareness of the tangible world and its limits. I approach the natural materials of coal, oil, hair, and cotton fibre as echoes and extensions of my imperfect body.

Painting dismembers an image – slows it down – in the inverse of the speed and distraction the media environment thrives upon. It offers potential to deconstruct the colonial myth of mastery and completeness. Painting, both in process and as object, heightens awareness of the chaotic and irrational nature of the body. Painting stimulates sensations that in their depth, contradiction, and complexity resist capitalist ideations of the body as commodity. Both paint and the body have traction. They are slow, confused, and inefficient.

The directly manual gesture, flawed and vulnerable, becomes an allegory of the body’s tenuous relationship with the world. It is also what connects us as human beings.

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Michael Antkowiak (born in Warsaw, Poland, 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, University of Toronto Mississauga Campus/Sheridan College.

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