Slawomir Elsner

Slawomir Elsner is a contemporary Polish artist born in Wodzislaw, Poland. He is known for his emotionally charged and realistic yet distorted representations that play with viewers' expectations and engage the imagination.

Slawomir Elsner's Biography

Slawomir Elsner was born in Wodzislaw, Upper Silesia, Poland in 1976. During the mid-eighties, he migrated to Germany with his parents. He pursued his artistic education at the prestigious Kunsthochschule Kassel, where he studied Fine Arts from 1995 to 2002.

Elsner's artistic repertoire spans drawings, watercolors, and paintings, often showcased in extensive and conceptual series. Notably, he garnered attention for his recent large-format analytical colored-pencil drawings, inspired by the masterpieces of the Old Masters and Classical Modernism.

Throughout his career, Elsner has showcased his artwork extensively across Europe, receiving recognition from museums and galleries. His exceptional creations can be found in major German institutions and collections in Munich, Dresden, Bremen, Witten, Stuttgart, and Frankfurt am Main.

 Currently, Elsner resides in Berlin, where he continues to work.

The art style of Slawomir Elsner

Slawomir Elsner's art offers a captivating interplay between the recognizable and the enigmatic. Through his artistic process, he subtly bends reality, infusing it with an unsettling atmosphere and a nuanced narrative. In this way, he challenges the viewer to question their own assumptions and delve deeper into the layers of his compositions.

Although Elsner's works are far from conceptual or abstract, he skillfully engages with the viewer's expectations and visual habits through his figurative paintings, often based on photographic references. By employing this approach, he invites the audience to explore beyond the surface, tapping into their imagination.

Slawomir Elsner focuses on works on paper, watercolors, and crayon drawings in his practice. His series-based approach and innovative techniques challenge traditional notions of drawing as he ventures into uncharted territories of color, composition, and spatial representation. Instead of using the “classical” line drawing, defining the volume of space through singular lines, Elsner circumscribes the pictorial space with hundreds of straight line bundles.