Czarnobyl - (PL)

On April 26, 1986, the world´s worst nuclear accident happened in the Ukraine, to become famous as the Catastrophe of Tschernobyl.

During this worst MCA great amounts of radio-active substances were set free and covered large parts of Europe. The surrounding population suffers until today from the consequences: extensive resettlements, environmental pollution to a large extent, fatalties due to cancer and leukemia, increase of deformities in the following generations and psychic stress of all those affected.

Out of this scenery Damian Terlecki alias “Czarnobyl” takes his inspiration to create his very own art. Having grown up on the border to the Ukraine where dirty, grey and with smog covered flat buildings and large-spaced industrial areas dominate daily life, he searched for a universe, that was more ferocious and even more repellent at the same time.

He creates dark, dreary and repulsive worlds of confrontation out of shapes and motifs of bizarr appearing people. His pictures show an optical overdose of shapes and an almost exaggerated granularity of photografical portaits and force the spectator to dive into his universe.

With his art he wants to galvanize people and show them things from a different point of view as a grotesque contrast of those being programmed by the system. He repeats his motifs, thus exactly finding excitement in multiplying and deforming them, creating a mutated aesthetic. His richness of detail is achieved by using many stencils for each single layer of colour. The single layer of colours of a photo are manually detached and worked on with films and cuttings tools. This is how the entire depth of his pictures emerges from the enormous amount of work. Damian has been living and working in Berlin since 1993.