Press Release

During his time in quarantine, Paul Glabicki completed the final chapters of his 10 SCENES drawing series that was begun in 2018. Instructional books on the use of words to express emotion, create characters, arrange scenes, form narratives, and construct plots served as the catalyst for this series.

The 10 SCENES series is composed of complex collages of words and images that suggest fragments of narratives in the process of forming. Each piece suggests themes such as travel, calamity, romance, mystery, or conflict through specific props, words, color, or detail. The works are cinematic narratives, employing focus, editing and montage.

The path of the narrative evolved during the pandemic. Earlier drawings dealt more with fantasy, travel and romance. The latter drawing were encoded with reality, stay at home and travel restrictions. SCENE #8 is informed by patriotic props and color. The final SCENES suggest shelter in place and change in behavioral habits.

10 SCENES explores components of a narrative as fractured data in an abstract space – a space (much like a book) formed in the mind of the reader or viewer in response to the information provided by the artist.

Paul Glabicki is renowned for his experimental film animations that have appeared at major film festivals, as well as national and international museum exhibitions. His animation work in film has been carefully crafted by means of thousands of hand-drawn images on paper – each drawing representing both a frame of film and a unique complete work on paper. His film works have been widely screened at such prestigious sites as the National Gallery of Art, Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of Art in New York (Whitney Biennial), the Venice Biennale, New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, and the Cannes Film Festival. He has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Film Institute.

link to artist website