Marcin Dudek
Klatka VII Education, 2026
Acrylic paint, wood, steel, image transfer, paper mâché, medical tape, UV varnish
Open: 50 x 86 x 18 cm - 19 3/4 x 33 7/8 x 7 1/8 in
Closed: 50 x 30 x 5 cm - 19 3/4 x 11 3/4 x 2 in
Closed: 50 x 30 x 5 cm - 19 3/4 x 11 3/4 x 2 in
Copyright The Artist & Harlan Levey Projects
The five works of the Klatka series unfold like small altar-like structures, manuscripts or folded journals, each recording fragments of life on and around the council estate. Together, they form...
The five works of the Klatka series unfold like small altar-like structures, manuscripts or folded journals, each recording fragments of life on and around the council estate. Together, they form an environment where memory and imagination overlap, and the past persists as an affective, dreamlike presence rather than a closed narrative.
Klatka (Belt) maps Dudek’s education as a sequence of imposed structures, detours, and gradual reorientations. At its center is a standard militia uniform belt. On Dudek’s eighteenth birthday, he was struck with it eighteen times, a ritualized punishment marking a threshold into adulthood. In this work, the belt functions as both visual spine and timeline, measuring years of schooling through the language of authority, discipline, and institutional control.
The panel traces Dudek’s path from primary school through his teenage years in the school for problem children (OHP), then on to technical school, and eventually to art studies in Salzburg and London. At each stage, he was placed into vocational tracks intended to determine his future. At OHP, he was assigned to the gardening program, and images of shoveling from instructional textbooks recur throughout the work. In practice, students were often sent to dig for roadworks rather than tend gardens. Later, at technical school, Dudek briefly trained as a car mechanic, another prescribed route that was ultimately abandoned.
A rigid grid structures the surface, echoing the lined paper of school notebooks that appears toward the lower portion of the panel. This formal order reinforces education as a system of repetition, discipline, and containment, one that simultaneously restricts and shapes its subjects. The work records not achievement but endurance, tracking how imposed knowledge, labor, and discipline accumulate over time.
Seen in this light, Klatka (Belt) maps the least predictable part of Dudek’s biography. It traces an educational trajectory that was never designed to produce an artist, and yet, improbably, did. The work stands as a record of that unlikely passage, and of the formative pressures that made his eventual practice not only possible, but necessary.
Klatka (Belt) maps Dudek’s education as a sequence of imposed structures, detours, and gradual reorientations. At its center is a standard militia uniform belt. On Dudek’s eighteenth birthday, he was struck with it eighteen times, a ritualized punishment marking a threshold into adulthood. In this work, the belt functions as both visual spine and timeline, measuring years of schooling through the language of authority, discipline, and institutional control.
The panel traces Dudek’s path from primary school through his teenage years in the school for problem children (OHP), then on to technical school, and eventually to art studies in Salzburg and London. At each stage, he was placed into vocational tracks intended to determine his future. At OHP, he was assigned to the gardening program, and images of shoveling from instructional textbooks recur throughout the work. In practice, students were often sent to dig for roadworks rather than tend gardens. Later, at technical school, Dudek briefly trained as a car mechanic, another prescribed route that was ultimately abandoned.
A rigid grid structures the surface, echoing the lined paper of school notebooks that appears toward the lower portion of the panel. This formal order reinforces education as a system of repetition, discipline, and containment, one that simultaneously restricts and shapes its subjects. The work records not achievement but endurance, tracking how imposed knowledge, labor, and discipline accumulate over time.
Seen in this light, Klatka (Belt) maps the least predictable part of Dudek’s biography. It traces an educational trajectory that was never designed to produce an artist, and yet, improbably, did. The work stands as a record of that unlikely passage, and of the formative pressures that made his eventual practice not only possible, but necessary.
