Worlds Apart BOGUMIL BRONKOWSKI

Worlds Apart by BOGUMIL BRONKOWSKI

October 4 – November 10, 2018

COMMUNITY GALLERY

My current body of work explores the concepts of struggle, place, and belonging. I immigrated to America at the age of nine; initially, no one told me that my family was permanently moving here. I boarded that international flight thinking that my family and I were coming for a vacation. It was devastating. I never said goodbye to many of my family and friends. I left behind everything that was familiar and came to a completely new environment, and since I was moving from a small town in Poland to Chicago, one of the most populated cities, the change was drastic. I had to navigate through this new, strange, yet exciting world without knowing the language or the customs of my new land. The process was scary, and many things did not make sense when I first arrived. It was similar to an alien being beamed down to a new planet; I had to learn a total new way of life.

My paintings reflect my personal experiences in that the viewer has to work to solve and make visual sense of each image. I play with the sense of space and depth, and my painting do not always make formal sense, much like America did not make sense to me when I first arrived here. Sometimes the image balances coming together as a whole, while other times it threatens to disintegrate into the separateness of the elements that compose it. My paintings are alien landscapes, confusing, exciting and intriguing.