Marcin Dudek

Marcin Dudek’s practice follows enclosed spaces–how we make them and how we interact with them when they are made. Dudek himself grew up in the housing estates that can be found across Poland, and his irritation with these flats was not so much to do with their sizes as with their repetition. An attempt to escape the mundane is a recurring theme in Dudek’s work, whether applied to the surface of a cardboard or to the gallery space itself. Past artistic investigations have been concerned with the tunnels used by drug smugglers along the US-Mexican border and the Cu Chi tunnels excavated by the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. In I Will Eat This Sleepy Town (2011), Dudek unearthed a tunnel at Waterside Project Space in London that led the visitor across the gallery in a peculiar and convoluted path. This construction, made from little more than packaging tape, became an imposing and solid conduit for the visitor’s movement and thought–from the surface to the antipodean’s interior.

Solo presentations of Dudek’s work have been shown at Harlan Levey Projects in Brussels, Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery in Krakow, and at the 16th Biennial of Cerveira in Portugal. Dudek exhibits internationally at venues including Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Kunstlerhaus in Salzburg, the Arad Art Museum, and the Goethe Institute in Kiev. His installation The Cathedral of Human Labor (2013) in on permanent view at the Verbeke Foundation in Antwerp.

Courtesy of The Drawing Center