The shark's teeth are out

SHARK’S TEETH ARE ON THE OUTSIDE

"One only has a beautiful childhood once"—I quote Bertolt Brecht from his poem What They Say to a Child. A few lines earlier, he writes that a child also hears: "The lazy will never succeed in life" and "One does not make fun of disability." We all heard things—each of us did—but most often, the simple, ordinary NO. Parents of children aged 1-2 forbid them from doing something every nine minutes. Brecht understood well that hearing no at the very moment a child wants something most, with all their heart, feels like the absolute end of the world. The expression of this conflict manifests in outbursts of rage, cruel fantasies, and what has since been popularized in the context of adult romantic relationships as a love-hate relationship.

We heard many things in childhood, and many thoughts came to us in response—sometimes they still do, when we feel bad, when fear grips us, when we are at a loss. Not all of these thoughts are beautiful or enlightened; some conceal cruelty, a desire for destruction, and morally indecent fantasies that can bring deep shame. I wonder if there is anyone who has never, even once, had a blood-soaked daydream about killing their parents, about wild animals tearing apart and scattering the body of an infuriating neighbor, about setting fire to the house of a hated boss?

Przemek Czepurko paints and sculpts cruel, eerie, tangled, and contradictory scenes. He captures the conflicts and ambivalences characteristic of childhood—the infantile battles waged on an all-or-nothing level. He invites us to experience once again those states in which our morality was not yet fully shaped by social norms and prohibitions, regressing us to a time of soap-opera-like dramas and the fierce emotional storms of childhood. His work encourages us to relive those early years with the awareness that our present-day emotional outbursts and fantasies originate from there.

The ability to daydream is our superpower—a cruel and beautiful fairytale that each of us weaves over and over again.

Katarzyna Ożgo


Reading history—whether private and individual or political and social—is forever marked by an inescapable ambivalence. We can never be certain that a specific account, whether from a witness to events or a patient in therapy, will be entirely reliable. The past, affectively bending the course of events or the paths through which our memories travel, operates by a secret law, changing its face, camouflaging itself, flattering or unsettling us. It compels eternal fantasies, always ready to slip away at the least expected moment. In doing so, it suspends the certainty with which we might make ethical judgments—once rewritten, history can take on a completely different form.

In Przemek Czepurko’s works, personal narratives intertwine with broader reflections on what has passed—sometimes very recently, sometimes nearly a century ago. Family history subtly interlaces with difficult events whose interpretations can be found in textbooks. The past in his work takes the form of a dream—or rather, a nightmare, marked by cruelty and painful fantasies. A dream from which it is difficult to wake, and whose images linger even after our eyes have opened. Its meandering structure mysteriously echoes the past we ourselves have lived or have come to know through countless intermediaries and interpreters.

On the morning of March 28, 1947, General Karol Świerczewski, traveling in a convoy of cars towards Baligród, fell into an ambush by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). During the brief skirmish against overwhelming forces, Świerczewski sustained three wounds, which proved fatal. The circumstances of this event remain subject to new historical interpretations, and several commissions have investigated the course of the ambush, often presenting conflicting facts. Similarly, his earlier history has been the subject of contradictory interpretations—he has been depicted both as a hero of the Spanish Civil War and as an inept Red Army commander plagued by alcoholism, a participant in ethnic purges during Operation Vistula, and the executioner of Polish underground soldiers. His death was commemorated in poems by Paul Éluard, Władysław Broniewski, and Mieczysław Jastrun. Yet his monuments have been toppled, plaques bearing his name removed, and the memory of his life remains indelibly tainted.

Czepurko’s wooden bust of Świerczewski engages in an extraordinary play with the ambiguity of historical narratives. The general, his lips tightly sealed in eternal silence, stripped of military attributes, historical context, or even clear gender characteristics, appears as an oneiric afterimage, a fragment of a past whose witnesses have perished. His likeness is transported by the artist into the realm of personal fantasy, and the events at Jabłonki now emerge amid scenes of small and large apocalypses—landscapes engulfed in flames, depictions of violent conflict, and veiled symbols of deeply buried emotions. There is no classical hierarchy here between the lofty and the low; like in the logic of dreams, grand history intertwines with fragments of private life.

Traumatic events have been brought to life through an astonishing subtlety of means. Their form unexpectedly evokes both the conventions of historical painting (reminiscent of Italian trecento art) and a childlike way of representing reality, where facts about the observed world inevitably merge with fantasy. The brushwork resembles the trace of a child’s crayon, perspective eludes linear rigor, yet the whole composition is executed with remarkable discipline and precision. The artist draws upon the tradition of icon painting, replacing the expressive impasto typical of oil paint with a meditative process of slowly filling the surface and constructing form. These secular icons once again complicate our understanding of time—an ancient visual language meets contemporary reality. This is yet another level of the ambiguous game that Czepurko plays with us. Within the exhibition, it takes the form of a peculiar narrative—mysterious, full of omissions and empty spaces. Suddenly, we find ourselves unable to discern a clear boundary not only between the individual and the collective but also between what arises from the depths of the artist’s personal emotions and what emerges from the tangled web of feelings within ourselves.

Michał Zawada