Exercises in Ethics

A conceptual artist, art theoretician, and educator, Jarosław Kozłowski uses words, light, sound, and objects to conceive his works spanning over various media, including installation, photography, drawing, and performance. Dealing with language and media culture, he explores signs, symbols and visual systems of power. Influenced by the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein on language, Kozłowski’s early works address the politics of representation and linguistics. During the 1980s, he focused on the questions of value, authenticity, and originality in art. Starting with the 1990s, the artist mostly dealt with political slogans taken from the media, national flags, and signs found in public space. In his works after the 1990s, he engaged in altering the functions of everyday items, to suggest temporary relations and interactions that shifted common understandings of them.

Kozłowski’s installations conceived during the 1970s, including "Modal Drawings", "Exercises in Aesthetics" and "Exercises in Ethics" traverse questions related to complete structures of meaning that suggest an understanding of the world. The artist’s work "Exercises in Ethics" is an installation that confronts formal perceptions of reality and materiality. Referring to linguistics, the grammar of artistic language and the politics of representation, Kozłowski addresses the limits of formal logic and its relations with reality.