Moving between cultural memory and the contemporary flow of images, Grudzinski creates paintings in which figuration dissolves into abstraction and painting asserts its own autonomy.
Julien Grudzinski (b. 1976, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland) is a Swiss contemporary artist whose practice investigates the unstable territory between abstraction and representation. He studied at the École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, graduating with honours, and currently works in Aix-en-Provence, France.
At the centre of Grudzinski’s practice is an exploration of cultural memory and the changing status of images in the digital age. He approaches Western artistic heritage as a vast visual archive, extracting fragments from historical paintings and removing them from their original contexts. These elements are copied, deconstructed, distorted, erased and superimposed, becoming raw material for new compositions in which historical references coexist with distinctly contemporary forms.
Digital imagery plays an important role in this process. Grudzinski frequently develops preparatory collages on a computer, adopting principles of layering, cropping and superimposition before translating them into painting. On canvas, figurative fragments encounter biomorphic forms, gestures, lines and fields of intense colour. The distinction between foreground and background becomes unstable, while recognizable imagery can gradually disappear beneath successive pictorial layers.
Recurring throughout his work are raised lines that Grudzinski describes as “energy flows.” Inspired by the human, economic and informational flows that structure contemporary society, these lines form intricate networks across the surface of his paintings. They evoke arteries, waves or organic systems, creating a sense of continuous movement while further dissolving the distinction between representation and abstraction.
More recently, Grudzinski has extended these investigations into landscape. Beginning with digitally captured and manipulated images, he transforms territories into fragmented, multicoloured structures in which technological references gradually disappear. Whether engaging with art-historical imagery, contemporary visual culture or landscape, his work ultimately pursues what he describes as the autonomy of painting: an attempt to free the medium from the established conventions of both figurative and abstract art.