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# Rainbow Sherbert Collages of Calamity
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/rainbow-sherbert-collages-of-calamity/
- Published: 2015-10-23T14:00:38.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:30:31.000Z
- Description: The clash of cheery colors with destructive scenes gives this artist's images a subversive, dissonant power.
- Author: Carey Dunne
- Tags: Art, collage, Nahmad Contemporary, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:13 (2014, 2015, part 3)

![Uklanski Ivy Mike](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/10/uklanski-ivy-mike.jpg)

Piotr Uklanski, “Untitled (Ivy Mike)” (2010) (all images courtesy the artist and Nahmad Contemporary)

With a multicolored palette and a medium often associated with elementary school art classes, New York–based artist Piotr Uklański creates startling large-scale collages of calamities: hurricanes, lightning storms, nuclear bomb tests. The clash of cheery colors with destructive scenes gives his images a subversive, dissonant power. At first glance they look like bright, pleasant landscapes — until you realize they’re about war and death.

Now showing at Manhattan gallery Nahmad Contemporary, [*Piotr Uklański: Collages*](http://www.nahmadcontemporary.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com)features the Polish-born provocateur’s lesser-known works made from torn paper. “I like the contrast of beauty and something that symbolizes a complete disaster,” Uklański tells Hyperallergic. “That paradox isn’t my invention, but I think that the collages with dark subject matter instead of sunsets are my most successful ones.”

Uklański, who says he’s attracted to “lo-fi visual extravaganza with minimal production,” is best known for painting, sculpture, film, installation, and performance, as well as photography, some of which was recently [shown at the Met](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/arts/design/review-in-fatal-attraction-piotr-uklanskis-unblinking-gaze.html?ref=hyperallergic.com). In 2003 he started painting large sheets of Lanaquarelle paper with brilliantly colored gouache — hot pinks, lemon yellows, and acid greens — then tearing and gluing the bright shapes together. Collage is a medium he thinks is often taken less seriously than others, and his choice of violent subjects aims to challenge this. “People look down on paper — they think it’s a less precious material than paint or photography,” he says. “I don’t really know where that comes from. It’s not exactly easier to make collages. But there’s a little bit of prejudice \[against the medium\],” despite the fame of, say, Henri Matisse’s cut-outs. 

![JNA_Uklanski_092115_4637 (1)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/10/jna_uklanski_092115_4637-1.jpg)

Piotr Uklanski, “Untitled (Castle Romeo)” (2015)

Uklański drew some inspiration from Matisse, as well as other 20th-century collage masters, but the works in this show were more directly influenced by low-budget graphic ads he saw as a child growing up in Communist Poland. “They were these cheaply made graphics advertising tourist attractions — posters telling you to visit the mountains of Poland, the covers of cheap novels — which used this immediacy of torn paper to create landscape images, or the illusion of an image,” he says. 

Instead of crisply scissored cut-outs, Uklański uses the ragged white edges of torn paper, which collagists generally hide, as the visual focus of his pictures. “Tearing paper is a bit of a violent gesture,” he says, and the tears convey an immediacy and tactility that other mediums often can’t. These bright, ripped white bits become textural metaphors: They create cracked skies in his images of lightning bolts, plumes of smoke coming off mushroom clouds, and the brilliant halo of a rising sun.

![JNA_Uklanski_092115_4543 (1)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/10/jna_uklanski_092115_4543-1.jpg)

Piotr Uklanski, “Untitled (Dark and Stormy)” (2015)

![JNA_Uklanski_092115_4591](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/10/jna_uklanski_092115_4591.jpg)

Piotr Uklanski, “Untitled (Storm Rider)” (2015)

![Uklanski Day After](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/10/uklanski-day-after.jpg)

Piotr Uklanski, “Untitled (The Day After)” (2004)

![Uklanski lightning bolt](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/10/uklanski-lightning-bolt.jpg)

Piotr Uklanski, “Untitled (Lightning Bolt)” (2003)

[Piotr Uklański: Collages](http://www.nahmadcontemporary.com/exhibitions/piotr-uklanski?ref=hyperallergic.com) *is on view at Nahmad Contemporary (980 Madison Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through October 28.*